Joy in Service on Rue Tagore

Paul Muldoon

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571386031
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE

'To describe Paul Muldoon's influence on contemporary poetry is like trying to assess the influence of The Beatles on post-war music: it's to be seen and heard in the work of almost every British and Irish poet since the 1970's.' Irish Post

Since his debut, New Weather (1973), Paul Muldoon has created some of the most original and memorable poetry of the past half-century. Joy in Service on Rue Tagore sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the the highest accolades.

Here, from artichokes to zinc, he navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In the poet's skilful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus - the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are electric in their energy, while profoundly humane in their line of enquiry.

'Truly, is there any living poet with as skilled and rambunctious an ear as Paul Muldoon? . . . One of the pleasures of Muldoon's poems is the way they make reality seem to go right to the verge of surrealism, the very shaky lip of it.' Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

Table of contents

• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Spurs
• Near Izium
• Anonymous: A Blackbird
• The Belfast Pogrom: Some Observations
• The Hula Hoop
• The River Is a Wave
• Ducking for Apples
• When the Italians
• Horse Carpaccio
• For Language and Brief Nudity
• Artichokes and Truffles
• Pablo Neruda: “Ode to the Artichoke”
• Sure Thing
• A Quickie
• Rosalind
• By the Time You Read This
• The Glow-Worm to the Mower
• At the Grave of Chang and Eng
• Opossum
• Welcome to the Irish Alps
• Three Deer, Sharon Springs, November 2020
• Nativity, 2020
• The Wheel Invents the Road
• The Riders
• Coywolves
• A Graveyard in New England
• The Rain
• What Snow Is For
• Let the Hare Sit
• Whilst the Ox and Ass
• from Irish Slavers
• Winslow Homer: The Veteran in a New Field
• A Least Bittern
• Hardtack
• The MRI
• Joy in Service on Rue Tagore
• The Mourner
• The Castle of Perseverance
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright