Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems
by Paul Muldoon
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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, in which 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 show more Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un 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, flimflammers, 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. show lessTags
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bemusing but marvellous, I love especially the 1st sestina, The Misfits, which is a marvel of cheeky rhyme and rule-bending (as ever)
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ThingScore 50
Muldoon is so varied and lavish a poet that no reader will find him wholly accessible, for while on one page he may speak simply of his dog or cat, on the next he'll spread his learning thickly upon slabs of bread baked in six different ovens.
added by Shortride
Author Information
85+ Works 3,204 Members
Paul Muldoon was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. He lives with his wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, & his two children in New Jersey, & teaches at Princeton University. In 1999 he was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. (Bowker Author Biography)
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- Original title
- Moy Sand and Gravel
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- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.70)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 3
