Plan B - Hardcover

Paul Muldoon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1904634826 ISBN 13: 9781904634829

Publisher: Enitharmon Press, 2009

Synopsis

Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection, Plan B, an exquisitely produced collaboration with Norman McBeath, the Scottish photographer. I sat one evening with the photographs and copies of the poems and, like the kind of party host we've all been encouraged to believe ourselves to be, allowed them to get into conversation with each other”, writes Muldoon of his collection, which, he says, was curated by the poems and photographs themselves”. Typically, he's given this new genre a distinctive new name: photoetry.’ Observer

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987 he has lived in the USA, where he is now Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Muldoon was elected a Member of the American Academy in Arts and Letters in 2008. Among his awards are the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the International Griffin Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Shakespeare Prize and the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. The world-famous Irish poet's latest volume is a collaboration with the talented Scottish photographer McBeath, whose black-and-white images (an upright piano rotting in a meadow, an empty sofa, a stone doorway) suit the bitter, brilliant ironies in Muldoon's new poems. In the title sequence, “the KGB garotte/ might well be a refinement of the Scythian torc†; a later poem set at an office “Christmas party†begins, “They're poisoning the atmosphere/ now you and I've split.†The violent, almost acrid mood in these nonetheless witty and nimble poems looks back both to Muldoon's Horse Latitudes (2006) and to his similarly disillusioned poems of the early 1980s, especially Quoof (1984), arranged (as here) into short rhyming stanzas or else into sonnets, and focused (as here) on marital and extramarital disarray. Phrases from headline news apply, uncomfortably enough, to domestic trouble: “Extraordinary Rendition,†a pair of sonnets, concludes with a vacation gone badly wrong, “two tin plates and mugs in the shack†and “echoes of love-sighs/ and love-screams/ our canyon walls had already given back.†Muldoon often publishes short collections, almost chapbooks, in preparation for longer ones: this “Muldoodle,†as they are nicknamed, will shock and delight and whet transatlantic appetites. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Enitharmon Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1904634826
• ISBN 13: 9781904634829
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64