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Book Cover for: Moy Sand and Gravel, Paul Muldoon

Moy Sand and Gravel

Paul Muldoon

Winner:Pulitzer Prize -Poetry (2003)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon, "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" (The Times Literary Supplement).

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay, 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 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 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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
  • Publish Date: Apr 15th, 2004
  • Pages: 107
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.82in - 5.20in - 0.37in - 0.33lb
  • EAN: 9780374528843
  • Categories: European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

About the Author

Muldoon, Paul: - Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty years. He is the author of more than a dozen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems 1968-2014; and, Howdie-Skelp.

Praise for this book

"A marvellous book; nothing human, or inhuman, is alien to it." --Andrew Motion, The Independent Books of the Year

"Among the few significant poets of our half-century." --Tim Kendall, The Guardian

"Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down...Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does... authentically touched or delighted." --Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review

"One of the English-Speaking world's most acclaimed poets still at the top of his slippery, virtuosic game." --Publishers Weekly