Paul Muldoon in America

Paul Muldoon was looking west long before he left Ireland for the United States in 1987, and his transatlantic departure would prove to be a turning point in his life and work. In America, where he now lives as a US citizen, Muldoon’s creative repertoire has extended into song writing, libretti, and literary criticism, while his poetry collections have themselves extended to outlandish proportions, typified in recent years by a level of formal intensity that is unique in modern poetry. To leave Northern Ireland, though, is not necessarily to leave it behind. Muldoon has spoken of his ‘sense of belonging to several places at once’, and in the United States his work has found another creative gear, new modes of performance facilitated by his Irish émigré status. This book approaches the protean work of his American period, focusing on Muldoon’s expansive structural imagination, his investment in Eros and errors, the nimbleness of his allusive practice as both a reader and writer, and the mobility of his transatlantic position. It draws on archival research to produce provocative new readings of Muldoon’s later works. Exploring the poetic and literary-critical ‘long forms’ that are now his hallmark, this book places the most significant works of Muldoon’s American period under the microscope, and opens up the intricate formal schemes of a poet Mick Imlah credits as having ‘reinvented the possibilities of rhyme for our time’.