Synopses & Reviews
The title of
Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoons tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to be becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day. From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bushs America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament.
Horse Latitudes is a triumphant new collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.
Paul Muldoon is the author of nine books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning
Moy Sand and Gravel. He teaches at Princeton University and, between 1999 and 2004, was professor of poetry at Oxford University. The title of
Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to stand becalmed in mid-ocean, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day, and where sailors, in the days when Spanish vessels transported horses to the West Indies, would throw their live cargo overboard to lighten the load and conserve food and water. From Bosworth Field to Beijing, from the Battle of the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages written to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. Weaving between popular song and riddle, between haiku and densely compressed narrative,
Horse Latitudes is a new collection by an esteemed poet. "Muldoon's far-fetched, elaborate metaphors in many ways resemble Metaphysical conceits in their yoking together of imagery through a virtuoso display of his wit . . . Ben Jonson once declared that Donne, 'for not keeping of an accent, deserved hanging': What kind of death, one wonders, would he have asked the executioner to devise for Muldoon's serial crimes against the conventions of poetry?"
Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books "'Horse latitudes' is a nautical term referring to area thirty degrees north and south of the equator. Ships sailing these waters often find themselves becalmed, or thrown off course by baffling, unpredictable winds . . . His wordplay enacts a fundamental or existential embeddedness, revealing over and again the impossibility of untangling individual words or actions from the dizzying webs of language and history. Like the baffling breezes that confuse sailors in the horse latitudes, Muldoon's verbal sleights of hand insistently push the poem in unforeseen directions, making it drift into weird patterns and peculiar symmetries. Like his previous nine volumes,
Horse Latitudes presents a fiendishly complex weather system that only be negotiated with patience, open-mindedness, an enormous dictionary, and frequent recourse to Wikipedia . . . Muldoon's far-fetched, elaborate metaphors in many ways resemble Metaphysical conceits in their yoking together of imagery through a virtuoso display of his wit . . . Ben Jonson once declared that Donne, 'for not keeping of an accent, deserved hanging': What kind of death, one wonders, would he have asked the executioner to devise for Muldoon's serial crimes against the conventions of poetry?"
Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books "Age has deepened Muldoon's poetry, and in
Horse Latitudes he has been able, in his finely maintained tightrope act, to bear aloft both grief and playfulness."
Helen Vendler, The New Republic "
Horse Latitudes affirms anew that the poet is capable of sustaining an ethereal loftiness of discourse in a poetic language of exquisite grace . . . It rewards many readings with rare intellectual pleasure; the title sequence which unifies emotion and language in a perfectly tuned harmony, may be the finest sonnet cycle published since Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Orpheus' sonnets in 1922 ."
Jamie James, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Muldoon, now 55, is still the wonderboy of contemporary Irish (and English, and British) poetry, because of what he took fromand left withHeaney . . . Muldoon has not just built on Heaney's example (itself derived from Frost), but exploded it, creating not a voiceprint of the known Irish landscape, but a steady-state universe of expanding and collapsing localities and times strung together via a vertiginous lexicon . . . [The] deliciously hefty opening poem hurtles us into a volume of mostly short lyrics, anecdotes built by echolocation, ballads, and prodigious exercises in death-defying poetic forms, some self-invented, some received."Joyelle McSweeney, Rain Taxi "Playful language, political subtleties, and proclamations of grief gallop through Muldoon's melee of mythological and contemporary battlesdisputes where turtles cover corpses, Bob Dylan returns to Princeton, and violins made from horse heads sing plaintively of destruction . . . Beginning with a sequence of sonnets whose titles start with the letter B, to a series of instant messages formatted as haiku, to an ending that tributes rocker Warren Zevon, readers are in for a lively ride . . . Recommended."Library Journal "Muldoon is undisputedly a master poet. Many of his poems distinctly take up the poetic tradition yet skew it with half-rhymes and unlikely subjects for classical forms, and also engage deeply with the troubled politics of his native Northern Ireland yet intertwine them with Muldoon's own personal history, mythology and esoteric symbolism . . . [The poems] seduce the reader into repeated readings in which they only grow more interesting, a sure sign of their capacity to last. In his 11th collection, the Pulitzer Prizewinner and former professor of poetry at Oxford (his Oxford lectures are being released concurrently) is as good as ever. Amid the usual parade of poetic forms (a riddle, haiku and pantoum, among others), he treats post-9/11 America ('those were my Twin Towers, right?'); aging, fatherhood and mortality ('a country toward which I've been rowing/ for fifty years'); the notion of 'the old country' in a tour-de-force crown of sonnets ('Every escape was a narrow escape/ where every stroke was a broad stroke/ of an ax on a pig nape./ Every pig was a pig in a poke'); and the deaths of his sister and rocker Warren Zevon. With signature wit, Muldoon is preoccupied with the passage of time, the ways things change and stay the same, the distance between one culture and another, as well as the narrowing gap between high and popular culture."Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
"Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down . . . Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does. . .authentically touched or delighted." -Richard Eder,
The New York Times Book Review
"Without question one of the most inventive poets writing in English today." -Andrew Frisardi, The Boston Sunday Globe
Praise for Moy Sand and Gravel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize:
"Moy Sand and Gravel, Muldoon's ninth book of poems in twenty years, shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information over ordinary experiences, the play of observation and sensuous detail, of motion upon custom, of Irish and English languages and landscapes, of meter and rhyme." -Peter Davison, The New York Times Book Review
"[Moy Sand and Gravel] demonstrate[s] why [Muldoon] is regarded by many as the most sophisticated and original poet of his generation . . . dazzling." -Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books
"Certainly one of the most beguiling and delightful of writers." -The Economist
"A glittering vindication of complexity." -Brian Dillon, Time Out
"Fanciful, brief, strong and sprung by twinkle-eyed winks at the readers' intelligence, these poems will certainly stand the test of time, and of many readings." -John Freeman, The Seattle Times
"Paul Muldoon is the most original Irish poet of his generation . . . Muldoon's voice, with its taste for meaty unpronounceables and querulous urgencies, it like no other in contemporary poetry. While it distinguishes him from his acknowledged mentor Seamus Heaney and other brilliant Irish rhetoricians, it also establishes an honored place among them." -William Doreski, Harvard Review
Synopsis
The title of
Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to be becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day.
From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Thomas Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. Horse Latitudes is a triumphant collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.
About the Author
Paul Muldoon is the author of nine books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Moy Sand and Gravel (FSG, 2002). He teaches at Princeton University and, between1999 and 2004, was professor of poetry at Oxford University.