The Open Book: Featuring Pulitzer Prize winning Irish poet, Paul Muldoon

Muldoon is an Irish poet, editor, playwright, lyricist and translator. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Muldoon is the author of fourteen full-length collections of poetry, whose many awards include the Shakespeare Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the European Prize for Poetry, and the Seamus Heaney Award. Muldoon is currently editing a book of the lyrics of Paul McCartney and has played with Warren Zevon as well as Muldoon’s own occasional musical group, Rogue Oliphant. The title of his newest collection, Howdie-Skelp, refers to the slap a midwife gives a newborn. A wake-up call for us all, its poems include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, and a crown of sonnets about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Talk by Ed Madden on Muldoon’s Howdie-Skelp, March 28.

Muldoon speaks in person, March 30.