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“... up in other interviews. Irish writers enjoy meeting him when he or they cross the Irish Sea; and Paul Muldoon professes to like ‘a great number of poems by a great number of people from Michael Drayton to Craig Raine’. These may seem curious choices as termini of the English tradition, but at the modern end he seems to allude to what has become ...”

“... contemporary Scottish writers to the work of Caribbean poets, from one master of the fragmentary, Paul Muldoon, to another, Christopher Okigbo. Scholarship has buried Macpherson. From the 18th century to recent times the only question scholars have asked has been: ‘Are the Ossianic poems a fake?’ This is a boring question, and one easily ...”

“... to make reader-reception – or the most effective propaganda? – our arbiter of war. Shades of Paul de Man, perhaps.It would, for instance, be both a pity and a lie if another Irish anthology. Troubled Times: ‘Fortnight’ Magazine and the Troubles in Northern Ireland I970-91,† had left out ‘what really happened’: its bleak ‘Chronology of Events ...”

“... diagrammatic binarism. One need only compare the genuine speed and unreeling vertiginousness of Paul Muldoon’s sort-of-sonnet sequence ‘The more a man has the more a man wants’ to realise how lacking Murray is in poetic, as opposed to narrative momentum. In Muldoon, the plot seems an invention in which he might ...”

“... to follow the story, rather as one gropes for a dictionary to work through a poem by Paul Muldoon? As with Muldoon, the answer is yes and no: we should, and we often don’t. All reading – though poetry less so – allows for a high level of semantic redundancy: we can get the gist of a plot without ...”

“... subtlety of Derek Mahon; and singularly illuminating when she turns her attention to the work of Paul Muldoon: the long Muldoon poems ‘Immram’ and ‘The more a man has’, in particular, come in for impressive elucidation. Throughout this collection of essays, in spite of a quota of things to carp at, like the ...”

“... find tricky quotation, numerical patterns, foreign languages and ‘verbivocovisual’ effects in Paul Muldoon, or in John Hollander, the Yale-based poet and critic who stands about as far as any serious writer in America from neo-modernist or avant-garde programmes. Hollander’s Powers of Thirteen (1983) consists of 169 sonnet-like units with 13 lines ...”

“... Hofmann’s book comes in the footsteps of Tony Harrison’s Continuous, Craig Raine’s Rich, Paul Muldoon’s Quoof and Hugo Williams’s Letters Home, all of which voyage round the paterfamilias: that tradition is much more pious and affectionate. The Williams offers the closest comparison: it too is about an overbearing writer-father and adopts a ...”

“... works written by men. Not that poems about parents, for instance, can’t also be love poems, as Paul Durcan’s Daddy, Daddy shows. Faced with the problem that so many poets of recent years have written movingly about their fathers – Tony Harrison, Craig Raine, Hugo Williams, Paul Muldoon, Michael Hofmann ...”

“... especially outside Ireland, may wonder at the gap in sensibility between Heaney (born in 1939) and Paul Muldoon (born in 1951), but to read about Heaney’s first years, his ‘nineteen-fifties/Of iron stoves and kin groups still in place’, is to see that the two poets do come from different generations: ‘I was well and truly formed,’ Heaney ...”

“... Marvell and the ‘gifted group of Ulster poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon’ – poets surely very unlike the Member of Parliament for Hull. He asserts that ‘many of these are creatively grateful to Marvell,’ and then suggests, even more extravagantly, that ‘it is likely that there is at least some relevance in ...”

“... as a complacent insider that I reflect on the difficulty of telling it how it is, best phrased by Paul Muldoon in ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’: For there’s no such book, so far as I know, As How it Happened Here, Though there may be. There may. ‘Pancho Villa’ symbolises the phenomenon of ‘the revolutionary tourist’, mentioned by Sally ...”

“... etc – could well be applied to poets. If Paul Muldoon is a ‘qu’ – ‘quicksilver’, ‘quirky’, ‘exquisite’, with some of his favourite words being ‘quibble’, ‘quidditas’ and his own neologism. ‘quoof’ – then Longley would be a ...”

“... We are used to hard words from Belfast and the impingement (even in so wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent ...”

“... narration), is a much-abused term. At one pole it can legitimately cover some of the fictions that Paul Muldoon conjures from phrase and symbol. But Carver, although his narratives are not necessarily transparent, sets out from the other pole, from event. And the short story has nurtured (or did it draw on?) the instinct that marks a real poet: where to ...”