Moy Sand and Gravel

Paul Muldoon

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2010
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571263899
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY 2003

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, where he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr and Mrs Stanley Joscelyne, an unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's 'A Prayer for My Daughter' with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flim-flammers, fixers and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Hard Drive
• Unapproved Road
• Moy Sand and Gravel
• The Misfits
• The Braggart
• The Whinny
• A Collegelands Catechism
• Beagles
• Tell
• Guns and Butter
• One Last Draw of the Pipe
• Caedmon’s Hymn
• Paul Valéry: Pomegranates
• Pineapples and Pomegranates
• Winter Wheat
• Herm
• Whitethorns
• Affairs of State
• The Otter
• John Luke: The Fox
• Anthony Green: The Second Marriage
• As
• The Stoic
• Famous First Words
• The Grand Conversation
• On
• An Old Pit Pony
• Summer Coal
• The Loaf
• The Outhouse
• News Headlines from the Homer Noble Farm
• The Killdeer
• Horace: Two Odes
• Eugenio Montale: The Eel
• When Aifric and I Put In at that Little Creek
• The Ancestor
• Homesickness
• Two Stabs at Oscar
• The Breather
• The Goose
• A Brief Discourse on Decommissioning
• The Turn
• Redknots
• Redknots
• At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999
• About the Author
• Copyright