Meeting the British

by Paul Muldoon

Meeting the British is Paul Muldoon's fifth collection of poems. They range from an account of the first recorded case of germ warfare, through a meditation on a bar of soap, to a sequence of monologues spoken by some of the famous, or infamous, inhabitants of '7, Middagh Street', New York, on Thanksgiving Day, 1940.

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature

59 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1987

About the author

Born in Northern Ireland, Muldoon currently resides in the US and teaches at Princeton University. He held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 through 2004. In September 2007, Muldoon became the poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Awards:
1992: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Madoc: A Mystery
1994: T. S. Eliot Prize for The Annals of Chile
1997: Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry for New Selected Poems 1968–1994
2002: T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) for Moy Sand and Gravel
2003: Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada) for Moy Sand and Gravel
2003: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel
2004: American Ireland Fund Literary Award
2004: Aspen Prize
2004: Shakespeare Prize

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

neat little Paul with the famous long poem 7, Middagh Street at the end where PM takes on all those voices & has a curious little formal arrangement where the last line of one poem and the opening of the next are conjoined by a noun and a phraseme. He's looking at Auden, Yeats, Lorca here especially and generally does it well in a Muldoony way. Famous title poem is icy and tragic as ever and I think one of his best efforts. Also a fan of Gold in here it seems to be a rare moment where Paul nearly collides with Heaney

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A box of tricks: allusive, erudite, demanding, sometimes shot through with a sort of ponderous, donnish humour. But not just tricks. There are reckonings with history and mortality, with landscape (although never as pithy or as immersed as Heaney) and memory. The long final sequence, evoking the inhabitants of a mid-20th century Brooklyn address where Auden, Dali, McCullers and others lived, is especially esoteric and freighted, and at the same time a bravura act of serial ventriloquism with moments of almost psychedelic multi-layered imagery. There are pleasures both cerebral and emotional to be had, treasures both forthright and obscure.

[Tom Wein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dense with names, unbeguiling rhythms, I mostly felt impatient.

[Tatiana Alejandra de Castro Pérez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read previously some poems by Muldoon during a Poetry course and this was my first "complete book" by him. I love the way he mixes the mundane things and lofty things, how he talk about Ireland and his youth or even about many politicians and writers. I think that Eduardo Iriarte Goñi is right when he said that Muldoon is capable of giving each character his or her own voice. A very pleasant and still challenging reading.

Tuve la oportunidad de leer poemas de Muldoon en la universidad, incluyendo precisamente el que da título a esta obra. Las notas a la traducción son perfectas por su relevancia e interés, los poemas en español son interesantes y de una lectura comparada se extrae aún más gusto a la obra que con una simple traducción al español. Los poemas de Muldoon son poderosos y tiene una gran capacidad, tanto para crear voces para sus personajes, como para mezclar lo cotidiano y lo más elevado, la historia y el presente, etc. Muy interesante esa retrospectiva de su vida y de la historia de su país. Muldoon siempre es un placer y un reto a la vez.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2171936.html[return][return]A collection of very dense, layered poems, first published in 1987, rooted in the author's experience in the small but deep-rooted world of Northern Ireland's cultural community. The title piece is above; the last poems in the book are a sequence imagining the author in the position of figures such as W.H. Auden, Salvador Dali and Louis MacNeice; most of them are short and end somewhat abruptly (though few have quite as vicious as sting as the title piece). All very thought-provoking.