A Ruin

Paul Muldoon

It might have been a gristmill, a dilapidated granary, or grangeI first drove by some sixty years agoand, with my little eye, espiedthrough a doorframe the tousled fernsand red-haired dockensof kids my own age sent out to play in the snow,their snowballsso specific in the sprawl.Windowless now, roofless, tuckedunder the first, sheltering hill of a rangethat ran all the way to Mexico—a country into which we still hoped to ridehell-for-leather, still hoped to adjournafter the stickup—this ruin betokensnot only the slo-mo-mowing of a meadow for a shopping mallbut the fate that would befallthe many tagged and retaggedover those sixty years. The landscape is so marked by change,the bungled peace process, the shoddy bungalows,the wind farms taking us in their stride,so marked by all the turnsthings have indeed takenfor kids now summoned back from playing in the snow,the nettles almost as tallas its dividing wall,a ruin seems the only thing intact.

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Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty-five years. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry including Howdie-Skelp, published by FSG and Faber and Faber in 2021. Among his awards are the 1972 Eric Gregory Award, the 1980 Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Pigott Poetry Prize, the 2017 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry, and the 2020 Michael Marks Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Cover of Howdie-Skelp

New York, New York

Macmillan

"[A] storm of slaps against piety, prudery, cruelty and greed . . . Like Eliot, Muldoon’s after big, apocalyptic vision; unlike Eliot, Muldoon is willing—no, compelled—to clown . . . Like many important poets before him, from John Milton to Tim Rice, Muldoon knows that sinners and villains are more interesting, maybe more human, than self-appointed good guys. Poems, for Muldoon, are occasions to plumb the language for a truth that’s abysmal: as in appalling, and as in deep.”
— Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

“Truly, is there any living poet with as skilled and rambunctious an ear as Paul Muldoon? . . . One of the pleasures of Muldoon’s poems is the way they make reality seem to go right to the verge of surrealism, the very shaky lip of it. How does he do it?”
— Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

"Howdie-Skelp . . . offers the kind of slap that great poetry from the likes of William Butler Yeats or Seamus Heaney can produce, the kind of poetry that can make a reader wince with delight."
— Michael Pearson, The New York Journal of Books

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