Muldoon, Paul

▪ 2004

      The U.S.-based poet from Northern Ireland Paul Muldoon—whose wit and confidence effervesced on the page, leaving readers at once amused and unsettled—won several awards and notices in 2003. His 2002 collection, Moy Sand and Gravel, reaped both the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize for an international writer. He was also presented with a Concert Music Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for the libretto of a one-act opera, Vera of Las Vegas. Though already at the apex of modern poetry, Muldoon displayed increasing vigour and virtuosity in his latest work. In the deft, succinct poems of Moy Sand and Gravel, American and Irish references cavorted, displaying pithiness with underlying seriousness. The Irish Times asked: “Who else can write love poems which echo [Constantine] Cavafy and Bob Dylan with equal authority?”

      Muldoon was born June 20, 1951, in County Armagh, N.Ire., the son of a labourer and gardener. He began writing poems in his teenage years and went on to study at Queen's University, Belfast, where he was tutored by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. “Gradually I began to learn,” Muldoon commented, “particularly from writers … who were writing about things I knew about.” At the age of 19, he completed his first collection of poems, Knowing My Place (1971). After graduating, he worked for BBC Belfast as a radio and television producer until his immigration to the United States in 1987, following the death of his father. He and his family settled in Princeton, N.J., where he became director of Princeton University's creative-writing program; he also served as honorary professor of poetry at the University of Oxford.

      Muldoon's many collections included Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), for which he won the T.S. Eliot Award, Hay (1998), and Poems 1968–1998 (2001). He also wrote libretti for operas and edited anthologies, and his work garnered a Guggenheim fellowship in 1990 and the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award in 1991. His oeuvre covered intensely personal and political terrain—from his wife's miscarriage to the Northern Irish conflict. He also explored elaborate imaginary encounters between historical figures, including one between Lord Byron and Thomas Jefferson, and tested himself with tight forms, such as haiku, sestinas, and sonnets. Muldoon suggested that he wrote “to sound very off-the-cuff,” aiming for “clear, translucent surfaces,” which, on closer inspection, held “other things happening under the surface.”

Siobhan Dowd

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