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’.

Alternative Models of irrigation development in Ghana

<p>Expansion of irrigated agriculture is central to efforts to enhance food security, reduce rural poverty, and increase resilience to climate change across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A broad variety of irrigation system typologies currently exist in SSA, ranging from ‘formal’ publically-financed surface water irrigation systems served by engineered infrastructure (e.g. dams and canals) to ‘informal’ farmer-led irrigation systems that receive little official support or recognition (e.g. private groundwater pumping and small-scale river diversions). Yet, at present, there is little objective or reliable information about the about the differences in agricultural productivity and livelihood outcomes resulting from these alternative approaches to irrigation developments in SSA, limiting capacity to design effectively new irrigation investments and evaluate reliably current and future trade-offs with other water uses (e.g. hydropower). Understanding the comparative performance of alternative existing approaches to irrigation development, along with the extent to which formal and informal systems complement or substitute one another, offers a valuable opportunity to generate new insights about best practice approaches for irrigation expansion. This paper seeks to address this challenge by exploring how alternative bio-physical, socio-economic, and institutional characteristics of irrigation developments influence welfare outcomes for smallholders.</p><p>Our analysis uses primary household panel data (n=646) collected in 2018 and 2019 from Upper East Ghana evaluate the characteristics of irrigation typologies and impacts on agricultural productivity. As a basis for our empirical analysis, we analyse the drivers of productivity differences across farmers in different irrigation typologies. We use descriptive statistics from the survey data to make inferences on heterogeneity of irrigation access across farmer groups. We then use a subset of the sample - limited to the main crops, paddy rice in the rainy season and pepper in the dry season- to analyse the differences in crop yields across farmer groups. To assess whether irrigation access and behaviour affects agricultural production and technical efficiency, we decompose the effects of agricultural inputs - including irrigation - and technical efficiency on crop yields.</p><p>Our preliminary findings demonstrate that farmers in formal irrigation schemes have higher yields, technical efficiency of agricultural production and lower costs compared to farmers in informal schemes across both growing seasons. We also find that farmers in formal schemes enjoy a broad range of benefits (for e.g., subsidised fertilizers and higher prices for their produce), which go beyond direct benefits from reliable and inexpensive water access. As a result, these farmers have lower agricultural costs, higher production and better welfare outcomes. These findings highlight the need for broadening public support for irrigators outside the government managed irrigation schemes, who are often neglected in official irrigation development narratives. Fertilizer subsidies, proper channels to sell agricultural output and proper maintenance of existing infrastructure outside formal schemes present opportunities to increase the efficiency and agricultural productivity of farmers in informal schemes.</p>

v-sheaves associated with perfect and formal schemes

This chapter explores v-sheaves associated with perfect and formal schemes. The more general formalism of v-sheaves makes it possible to consider not only analytic adic spaces as diamonds, but also certain non-analytic objects as v-sheaves. The chapter first analyzes the behavior on topological spaces. Let X be any pre-adic space over Zp. This is not a diamond, but the chapter shows that it is a v-sheaf. It assesses some properties of this construction. The chapter then looks at applications to local models and integral models of Rapoport-Zink spaces. By passage to the maximal unramified extension and Galois descent, one can assume that k is algebraically closed.

Shtukas with one leg

This chapter analyzes shtukas with one leg over a geometric point in detail, and discusses the relation to (integral) p-adic Hodge theory. It focuses on the connection between shtukas with one leg and p-divisible groups, and recovers a result of Fargues which states that p-divisible groups are equivalent to one-legged shtukas of a certain kind. In fact this is a special case of a much more general connection between shtukas with one leg and proper smooth (formal) schemes. Throughout, the goal is to fix an algebraically closed nonarchimedean field. The chapter then provides an overview of shtukas with one leg and p-divisible groups.

Adic spaces

This chapter reviews the theory of adic spaces as developed by Huber. There are two familiar categories of geometric objects which arise in nonarchimedean geometry: formal schemes and rigid-analytic varieties. The goal is to construct a category of adic spaces which contains both formal schemes and rigid-analytic spaces as full subcategories. Just as formal schemes are built out of affine formal schemes associated to adic rings, and rigid-analytic spaces are built out of affinoid spaces associated to affinoid algebras, adic spaces are built out of affinoid adic spaces, which are associated to pairs of topological rings. The affinoid adic space associated to such a pair is the adic spectrum. The chapter then looks at Huber rings and defines the set of continuous valuations on a Huber ring, which constitute the points of an adic space.