Howdie-Skelp

Paul Muldoon

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780571365753
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEK

A 'howdie-skelp' is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an 'affront' to good taste. Paul Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture, but to hold our attention.

Table of contents

• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Wagtail
• American Standard
• A Ruin
• Shoot ’Em Up
• Damsons
• Bramleys, Not Grenadiers
• 23 Banned Poems
• The Dirty Protest
• A Postcard From Saint Bart’s
• Mayday
• Anonymous: The Vikings
• Clegs and Midges
• The Fly
• The Pangolin, or Vasty
• The Ice Fishers
• Binge
• Cowmoose, Route 125, Ripton, Vermont
• Chipmunk
• The Triumph
• Salonica
• The Banisters
• The Sheet
• Le Jongleur
• An Item
• Oscar Wilde at the Pavilion Hotel
• Viral
• A Bull
• Plaguey Hill
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright