Maggot
poems
de Paul Muldoon
"The Most Significant English-Language Poet Born Since the Second World War."--The Times Literary Supplement. "The Poet's Poet of His Generation ... He has Created one of the Most Tumultuous and Engrossing Bodies of Work Still in Progress."--Lachalan Mackinnon, The Daily Telegraph (London). "Muldoon has Enfranchised a Whole Generation of Poets, by Freeing them into his Own Brand of Linguistic Euphoria. But What Sets Him Apart From His Imitators, and Raises him Above Them, is His Imaginative Scope and Daring ... He is a Fabulous Poet."--Stephen Romer, The Guardian. "Muldoon Seems to me One of the Five or so Best Poets Alive: to Most of Britain and Ireland, he Seems the Single Most Influential."--Stephen Burt, Boston Review. Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum commented in The Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to re-imagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W.B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its "subject" the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fair-ground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."--Jacket.
