Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems

By Paul Muldoon

Book Overview

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first sinceHay(1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374214808
• ISBN13: 9780374214807
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Good Stuff

Here's a Muldoon pastiche:BasementThen to spyin an unused cellar spotUnder a bulb fixturelong since jury-riggedin deal cast-offAnd between oil tankand salt-scalloped stone wall--Between a ruckand a carapace--A tiny skeleton--mouse.My instinct:to trip-tipsy the dark--As even the Deanand Cuchulain might--fantastic.[My opinion is that Muldoon peaked in 1990 with his tour de force, MADOC--A Mystery, the book-length poem and astounding work of the imagination. MADOC was large, confounding, mysterious, lyrical, and sui generis (really). Yet many readers/reviewers did not appreciate it. Since that work, Muldoon seemingly has tried to obtain such appreciation by offering more manageable fare--featuring topical themes, easy wit, sentiment, form, and rhyme (not to mention all those pretty names of Irish places). He has served up plates of warm apercus. If that is your thing--fine. He is terribly accomplished--his more recent poems, including those of Moy Sand and Gravel, sparkle with polish and panache. But I will take the polar edge of the creative MADOC thankyouverymuch.]