Paul Muldoon

‘The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.’

— Paul Muldoon

‘He may resort to familiar charms and rubrics, but his obsessions with particular forms and registers and vocabularies never dwindles to insensitivity. His is a triumph of technique—a constant resuscitation of the self and of form.’

— The Poetry Foundation

Paul-Muldoon-Pieter-M.-van-Hattem Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, and was a radio producer for the BBC in the 1970s and ’80s. He now lives in the United States where he is Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University. He has also been President of The Poetry Society (UK), Oxford Professor of Poetry and Poetry Editor at The New Yorker. He is Ireland Professor of Poetry (2022-2025).

Publications include To Ireland, I (essays), Hay (poems), Poems 1968-1998, Moy Sand and Gravel for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, The End of the Poem — a series of lectures he delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Horse Latitudes, Maggot, New Weather, Madoc: A Mystery, Why Brownlee Left and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). Other awards include the Eric Gregory Award, T S Eliot Award, Irish Times Poetry Prize, Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, The American Ireland Funds Awards, Pigott Poetry Prize, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters.

He has translated two collections of poetry by Nuala Ní Dhomnhaill, The Astrakhan Cloak (Gallery, 1992) and The Fifty Minute Mermaid (Gallery, 2007). Paul Muldoon’s translations from 18th-century Irish poems was published as Lamentations in 2017.

Other titles from The Gallery Press include Kerry Slides, with photographs by Bill Doyle; four plays, Six Honest Serving Men, The Birds (after Aristophanes), Vera of Las Vegas and The Dead, 1904, an immersive, site-specific play written in conjunction with Jean Hanff Korelitz; poetry collections, The Prince of the Quotidian, General Admission (song lyrics), Rising to the Rising (2016, a collection in Irish and English of Paul Muldoon’s various responses to commissions for Ireland’s 1916 Centenary) and Wayside Shrines (2009, a special limited edition, with drawings and paintings by Keith Wilson). Custom of the Coast, with illustrations by Martin Gale, was published in August 2024.

A Saoi of Aosdána, Paul Muldoon lives in New York City and Sharon Springs, New York.

CUSTOM OF THE COAST

Paul Muldoon’s typically inventive drama for two voices. One strand recounts the adventures of Anne Bonny, an eighteenth-century pirate from County Cork and a parallel strand reports the shameful case in which the lost pregnancy of Savita Halappanavar became her death sentence.

(with illustrations by Martin Gale)

€17.50 hb