Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since "Hay" (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the 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 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 forbears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.
'Among the few significant poets of our half-century' Tim Kendall, Guardian
Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He read English at Queen's University, Belfast, and published his first collection of poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (2006). Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. From 1999 to 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1996. Other recent awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, and the 2003 Griffin Prize.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780571215355 |
| ISBN 10 | 0571215351 |
| Title | Moy Sand and Gravel |
| Author | Paul Muldoon |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber |
| Year published | 2002-10-21 |
| Number of pages | 112 |
| Prizes | Winner of Griffin Poetry Prize - International 2003, Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2003, Winner of Pulitzer Prize Poetry Category 2003, Short-listed for Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection 2003 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |