Maggot

(Hardback, Main)

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If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W.B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are 'sex and the dead', Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century.

It's no accident that the centrepiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialise the scenes of fatal car accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but many of the round-songs that characterise Maggot.

Author Bio

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He published his first collection of poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Moy, Sand and Gravel for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1996. Other recent awards include the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize and the 2003 Griffin Prize.