Dislocations

Roger Rosenblatt, writing in the New York Times in 2016, described Paul Muldoon as 'one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems - word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury'. And angry.

Muldoon is always innovative and 'electric', but the focus in this selection is on linguistic 'departures' in his own practice. This is a selection (chosen by poet John Kinsella) of some of the more linguistically innovative and overtly 'experimental' poems from Muldoon's extensive and verbally rich oeuvre. Both inside and outside the avant-garde, Muldoon is ultimately a maverick whose unique voice is nonetheless steeped in the politics of a bilingual Irish poetics, with a forensic dissection of 'New World'-'Old World' (false) verbal dynamics.

We see and hear his poems in juxtaposition and proximity, in