Moy Sand and Gravel
About this book
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.
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Information
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
