Howdie-Skelp: Poems - Hardcover

by Paul Muldoon (Author)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection.

A "howdie-skelp" is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action.

The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon's new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an "affront" to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.

Author Biography

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty years. He is the author of over a dozen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems 1968-2014; and Frolic and Detour.