Paul Muldoon: Poetry, Prose, Drama

Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (Editor)

    Research output: Book/ReportAnthologypeer-review

    Abstract

    The twelve essays collected here chart the development of this unpredictable, innovative and challenging talent over the last thirty years. They offer a kaleidoscopic examination of Muldoon's achievement in the three genres of poetry, prose and drama, from a variety of perspectives. Taken together, these essays attempt to map the continuity of Muldoon's diverse and substantial oeuvre, but also to highlight its constant experimentalism; they demonstrate how difficult it is for us to know how seriously we should take anything Muldoon says, but alert us to the ways in which the playfulness and cleverness contribute to a profound ethical seriousness; they explore his complexly de-constructive technique to show how it represents a constant renewal of the self and of form; they show how the momentum for escape from the past is always contained within the recognition of the impossibility of escape; they examine the work as a means of both evasive self-protection from the world and self-expression of an intense emotional life; they calculate the ratios of scepticism and passion, unknowing and knowingness, which give the work its uniquely compelling power; they orientate the reader towards the Muldoonian home as always being located where it is not; they help us to see the way the writing folds back or feeds upon itself, and upon others' writings, yet years for freedom and transcendence. They are confirmation of the validity of Heaney's comment of nearly thirty years ago, when he said that Muldoon was the kind of writer who doesn't offer us answers, but keeps us alive in the middle of the question.Contents include:Elmer Kennedy-Andrews - 'Introducing Paul Muldoon: "Arbitrary and Contrary"'Peter Denman - '"O Mould-Breaker, and a Pun-Maker": Paul Muldoon and the Prosody of the Letter'Kathleen McCracken - '"Two streams flowing together": Paul Muldoon's Inscription of native America'Tim Kendall - 'Paul Muldoon's Twins'Tim Hancock - 'Dining Out with Paul Muldoon: Poetic and Personal Relations in the Restaurant Poems'Elmer Kennedy-Andrews - 'Heaney and Muldoon: Omphalos and Diaspora'Stan Smith - 'Leavings'Ivan Phillips - 'In the Electric Orchard: Technology, Literacy and the Innocence of Experience'Neil Corcoran -'Paul Muldoon in Conversation with Neil Corcoran'Clair Wills - 'Muldoon and the Dead'Heather O'Donoghue - 'The Poet as Critic: Paul Muldoon's To Ireland, I'Guinn Batten - 'So Long as There's an "I" in History: Paul Muldoon's Address of Poetry'Jerzy Jarniewicz - 'Zona Media or Paul Muldoon's "Little Books"'
    Original languageEnglish
    PublisherColin Smythe
    Number of pages291
    ISBN (Print)0-86140-459-9
    Publication statusPublished (in print/issue) - 1 Nov 2006

    Keywords

    • Paul Muldoon
    • contemporary Irish poetry
    • contemporary Irish prose-writing
    • contemporary Irish drama

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