Book Information
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- 2004-04-01
- Pages
- 120 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.7 x 0.71 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780374528843
- ISBN-10
- 0374528845
- Price
- 2946 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/British
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (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. Moy Sand and Gravel is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Paul Muldoon is the author of eight previous books of poetry, collected in Poems 1968-1998 (FSG, 2001). He teaches at Princeton University and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
Reviews
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Muldoon at his best
This is a powerful collection in which the subtle and profound mixed in with the day to day.
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Obscure
Poetry is an art form that succeeds only if the reader can share with the poet a vision communicated by the poem. How this work won a pulitzer prize escapes me. The only way for an "outsider" the read this book is with an interpreter and a dictionary so the obscure, at least from my point of view, references can be appreciated. As a reader I get no sense of the images the writer wants to conjure and the poems fail to take me anywhere but to the cliff of reason where I am just left without a bridge for crossing. I do not wonder I was able to purchase this book for such a low price.
Related Literary Awards
- Griffin Poetry Prize Edition 3 (2003) ・Winner