One Thousand Things Worth Knowing
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Another wild, expansive collection from the eternally surprising Pulitzer Prize–winning poet
Smuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie, yes, but also Lew Wallace's original book, and Seosamh Mac Grianna's Gaelic translation); a real trip to Havana; an imaginary trip to the Château d'If: Paul Muldoon's newest collection of poems, his twelfth, is exceptionally wide-ranging in its subject matter—as we've come to expect from this master of self-reinvention. He can be somber or quick-witted—often within the same poem: The mournful refrain of "Cuthbert and the Otters" is "I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead," but that doesn't stop Muldoon from quipping that the ancient Danes "are already dyeing everything beige / In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories."
If this masterful, multifarious collection does have a theme, it is watchfulness. "War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal," he warns in "Recalculating." And "Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt." Heedful, hard-won, head-turning, heartfelt, these poems attempt to bring scrutiny to bear on everything, including scrutiny itself. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing confirms Nick Laird's assessment, in The New York Review of Books, that Muldoon is "the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets," an experimenter and craftsman who "writes poems like no one else."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead." Muldoon (Maggot) opens his 12th book of verse with an impressive set piece, one major Irish poet's lament for another. The elegy makes the Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker poetry editor's fact-filled, intricately rhymed style sound not so much playful as meant to stave off grief, "hemmed in every bit as much// by sorrow as by the crush of cattle." There follow poems built around decades-old memories, reactions to paintings, and reactions to poems by Lorca, Pessoa, Dickinson, and Muldoon himself there is even an explicit sequel, "Cuba (2)." As loyal readers expect, there's also a stack of proper nouns worth Googling, and an assortment of bafflingly allusive objects: "the face of a barstool/ covered in a whale's foreskin," or "the chestnut tree where a soul was known to roost// before it was set in linotype." Unlike Muldoon's books of rock lyrics and literary criticism, these densely worked poems are meant to be re-read. All the pointers to earlier work, and to uncommon knowledge, make it less than ideal (except for the Heaney elegy) as an entry point to the Muldooniverse, but it's powerful nonetheless, with witty pleasures and strong feelings to be unlocked and cherished.