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Overview
My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala,
"The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane,"
when a girl reached down into a freezer bin to bring up my double scoop of vanilla.
-"White Shoulders"
Seamus Heaney has called his colleague Paul Muldoon "one of the era's true originals." While Muldoon's previous book, The Annals of Chile, was poetry at an extreme of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay is made up of shorter, clearer lyric poems, retaining all of Muldoon's characteristic combination of wit and profundity but appealing to the reader in new and delightful ways. His eighth book, it is also his most inviting-full of joy in language, fascination with popular culture, and enthusiasm for the writing of poetry itself. This is the first of his books to really capture the effect of America on his poetic sensibility, which is like a magnet for impressions and the miscellany of the culture.
Synopsis
My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala,
"The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower of Sweet Strabane,"
when a girl reached down into a freezer bin
to bring up my double scoop of vanilla.
-"White Shoulders"
Seamus Heaney has called his colleague Paul Muldoon "one of the era's true originals." While Muldoon's previous book, The Annals of Chile, was poetry at an extreme of wordplay and formal complexity, Hay is made up of shorter, clearer lyric poems, retaining all of Muldoon's characteristic combination of wit and profundity but appealing to the reader in new and delightful ways. His eighth book, it is also his most inviting-full of joy in language, fascination with popular culture, and enthusiasm for the writing of poetry itself. This is the first of his books to really capture the effect of America on his poetic sensibility, which is like a magnet for impressions and the miscellany of the culture.
New Republic - Adam Kirsch
At its best. . .Muldoon's use of the conceit can move beyond joking, producing something genuinely new and strange. . . .What makes Muldoon's poems truly distinctive is a much more total kind of strangeness, in which not just the images but the plot, diction, references, and formal scheme are so complex as to border on incomprehensibility.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"His boldest and most engaging poems yet."—Michael Hofmann, The Times (London)"Every generation has to clear a space to make itself heard, and Muldoon's way to clear a space in a tradition that includes William Butler Yeats, a visionary and urbane poet, and Patrick Kavanagh, an earthy country poet, and seamus Heaney, who some have said is a perfect fusion of the two impulses, was to write a different poetry altogether, witty, cosmopolitan, playful, and postmodern."—Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World
"A partial formal inventory of [this book] would include a stealthy chain of sonnets, a wicked ghazal, sinewy couplets, deadpan concrete verse experiments, a kaleidoscopic ninety-part haiku journal, and, of course, all those canting half- and quarter-rhymes. . . . Crafty, ruthless, and beautiful."—Robert Polito, Bookforum
Adam Kirsch
At its best. . .Muldoon's use of the conceit can move beyond joking, producing something genuinely new and strange. . . .What makes Muldoon's poems truly distinctive is a much more total kind of strangeness, in which not just the images but the plot, diction, references, and formal scheme are so complex as to border on incomprehensibility.—New Republic