Search Results
Poem of the Week: “The Wood” by Paul Muldoon
…fell trees That had stood for as long As anyone remembers?’ ‘The wood we have in mind will stand While it has lost its timber.’ —Paul Muldoon, from Mules (1977)…
Continue ReadingSelected Poems | Patrick Kavanagh
…f nearly equal length and possibly equal, though unrecognized, importance. Paul Muldoon presents his selection with a characteristically deft introduction, weaving biographical details into new ways of looking at Kavanagh’s life and lasting legacy of finding “a star-lovely art / In a dark sod.” View the Table of Contents From the Introduction by Paul Muldoon The turnips were a-sowing in the fields around Pettigo As our train passed through. A hors…
Continue Reading“It felt like a breaking of some taboo I’d placed myself under”: Caitríona O’Reilly on writing Geis
…he brilliant generation of Northern Irish poets: Montague, Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, and of course Heaney, and I think Muldoon in particular has been very influential. He was himself reacting against previous generations, of course, with his highly ironized style, suspicious of lyric earnestness or of anything that takes itself too seriously. But there are also brilliant women poets like Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke who are keeping the f…
Continue ReadingThe Astrakhan Cloak
…British Isles. The Astrakhan Cloak is in Irish and English; translated by Paul Muldoon Reviews “Certainly the work of both poets has much in common: sensuality, wit, irreverence and a delight in lore, legend (particularly local legend) and linguistic dexterity. And these exuberant poems filter a modern suburban existence through the beguiling miasma of a more ancient Ireland. . . . What Muldoon calls in one poem ‘the monsters of the imagination,…
Continue ReadingAn Interview with Frank Ormsby on THE DARKNESS OF SNOW
…endships flourished. My closest friends at the time were Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon and Conor Macauley, a colleague in the English Department at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (R.B.A.I. or Inst.) for over thirty years. I got to know Michael Longley when he was Literature Officer at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He was a staunch supporter of The Honest Ulsterman, which I edited at the time and which depended heavily on financi…
Continue ReadingCollected Poems | Louis MacNeice
…in part because of vigorous support from Irish writers like Edna Longley, Paul Muldoon, and Derek Mahon. MacNeice’s Collected Poems has finally been published in the United States, where readers will now have a chance to approach this underestimated writer on his own terms. . . . What we most want, MacNeice suggests, is simply to ‘know each other better,’ but that possibility depends on laboring blindly through darkness. With the publication of C…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “A Postcard Home” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
…r over and above what I could afford. –Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, translation by Paul Muldoon, from The Astrakhan Cloak (1993) More about National Translation Month NTM was founded in 2013 with three primary objectives: promoting translation scholarship, increasing translation prevalence in literary education, and promoting foreign language authors across cultures. NTM reminds readers of the increased literature accessibility and insight that translatio…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “As for the Quince” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
…a bhí ardú na méire ionam as san go ceann trí lá. Murab ionann is an crann a dh’fhan ann, slán. –Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, translated by Paul Muldoon, from Pharaoh’s Daughter (1993)…
Continue ReadingPharaoh’s Daughter
…chael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Tom MacIntyre, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and George O’Brien Reviews “[T]he branching-out, or shape-shifting, from Gaelic myth or folk-song to some less romantic or quirkier emblem of the present, is a constant resource of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry; and it’s one of the ways she has rescued the Irish language from its association with Gaelic League pieties or the pedantries o…
Continue ReadingFrank Ormsby
…ion of Northern Irish poets which includes Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin. He is a poet of the truest measure.” – Michael Longley, introduction to Goat’s Milk “[Ormsby’s] poems are concise, memorable and intelligent. . . . This is a poetry of simplicity and quiet power, one of hauntings, rememberings, and reimaginings.” – Seán Hewitt, Breac “Yet while [Ormsby] repeatedly celebrates the local and ‘the air-wide, skin-tig…
Continue ReadingThe New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland
…rd, as well as classic poems by Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Michael Longley. Reviews Wake Forest University Press continues its impressive dedication to Irish poetry . . . with The New North. . . . [T]he poems and poets offer an insightful, lyrical look into the psyche of 21st-century Northern Ireland.” – Irish America Magazine “American-born editor Chris Agee, who has lived in Northern Ireland for…
Continue ReadingSelected Poems | Louis MacNeice
…from Northern Ireland like Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon, because of his lyrically nuanced considerations of international as well as national issues. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, and educated in England where he resided for much of his adult life, MacNeice answered a need in these poets for a perspective that made the local have larger political significance. He also offered an angry critique of Ireland and…
Continue ReadingLouis MacNeice: Collected Poems NY Times Book Review
…ership, in part, to support from other Irish writers such as Edna Longley, Paul Muldoon and Derek Mahon. Orr provides an intimate glance into MacNeice’s melancholic childhood, a theme that permeates much of his work. He also praises MacNeice’s versatility via style and content, thoughtfully complimenting MacNeice’s beauty in repetition and refrain. There is a sense of circularity to MacNeice’s work, always harkening back from whence it came. It is…
Continue ReadingOnce a Student, Always a Student: Medbh McGuckian’s Love of Learning
…nglish. As a university student, McGuckian met our poets Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon, whom she still works with frequently. Also at Queens University, McGuckian studied under Seamus Heaney, who not only taught McGuckian much about writing, but inspired the current spelling of her name. While signing a book for her, Heaney wrote McGuckian’s first name in the traditional Irish way, spelling it Medbh rather than Maeve. McGuckian adopted this spell…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Ceist na Teangan / The Language Issue” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
…have it borne hither and thither, not knowing where it might end up; in the lap, perhaps, of some Pharaoh’s daughter. –Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, trans. Paul Muldoon, from The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2011)…
Continue ReadingMedbh McGuckian
…n. She received both a BA and MA from Queen’s University, where, alongside Paul Muldoon, she studied under Seamus Heaney. In 1985, she returned to Queen’s as the university’s first female writer-in-residence. She has also held residencies at the University of Ulster and Trinity College, Dublin, as well as universities in America. Medbh McGuckian published her first two chapbooks in 1980 before her first full-length collection, The Flower Master (1…
Continue ReadingGoat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems
…f Northern Irish poets which includes Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin. He is a poet of the truest measure.” – Michael Longley, from the Introduction Kindle version available at Amazon.com iBook version available on iTunes Reviews for Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems “If humility does not preclude potency, then these poems are modesty’s triumphs, and equanimity’s trumpet-blasts.” – Killian Quigley, MAKE Magazine “Read…
Continue ReadingThe Shack: Irish Poets in the Foothills and Mountains of the Blue Ridge
…ntroduced Wake Forest University to the world. Includes poems and prose by Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, David Wheatley, John Montague and Elizabeth Wassell, Vona Groarke, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Conor O’Callaghan, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. With lush watercolors by Kenneth Frazelle and an eighteenth-century painting of Old Salem by Christian Daniel Welfare. A handmade, limited-edition broadside of the title poem “The Shack”…
Continue ReadingPoetry By Heart
…I dwell in Possibility,” by Emily Dickinson as a 17 year old out of enthusiasm and love for the poem. Sinéad Morrissey joins Wake Forest Press poets Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, and Ciaran Carson as winners of the TS Eliot Prize. Here is the interview. Posted By: Sophie…
Continue ReadingPatrick Kavanagh
…conciseness by which so many of the rest of us will continue to steer.” – Paul Muldoon Patrick Kavanagh was born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, in October 1904. His poetry collections include Ploughman and Other Poems (1936), A Soul for Sale (1947), and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960). He also wrote the novel Tarry Flynn (1948) and an early autobiography, The Green Fool (1938). He died in Dublin in November 1967. Author port…
Continue Reading“Where language fades into cries or whispers”: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian
…like Yeats produces something that just occurs and balances] Most of what Paul Muldoon writes can be satisfying simply because of the fun in the rhymes which he is so very clever at. What first inspired you to begin writing poetry? And have your inspirations changed? Early in life I liked reading and composition at school. When I went to secondary school they were always wanting poems for magazines. The Beatles’ songs, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s f…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Melusine” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
…ssures they were under? How are we ever to understand what heroic feat it took for her to struggle free of them? –Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (translated by Paul Muldoon), from The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2011)…
Continue ReadingFrank Sewell on Editing and Translating Máirtín Ó Direáin: An Interview
…fore, it does not aim for originality in the way that, say, a contemporary Paul Muldoon poem would; it aims instead for an aesthetic of traditionalism. Yet it still is a very striking and important poem. I happened to be translating it around the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising, when some poets in Ireland were suggesting that no male poet had written a poem celebrating the “women of the Rising.” Clearly, they had not read or heard of Ó…
Continue Reading“Helen” by Frank Ormsby from GOAT’S MILK
…f Northern Irish poets which includes Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin. He is a poet of the truest measure.” Ormsby weaves his artistry with the his personal experiences throughout the collection and in this poem below. Helen (b. 12 August 1994) The war will soon be over, or so they say. Five floors below the Friday rush-hour starts. You’re out and breathing. We smile to hear you cry. Your long fingers curl around our…
Continue Reading