Howdie-Skelp

The hard-hitting new poetry collection from Ireland's most ingenious poet combines high-speed wit, tongue-twisting alliteration, and dizzying rhyme with insight, making us pause, laugh, remember, feel envious, out of breath, and punch-drunk.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 184 pages
Publication date: 02 November 2023
Publisher: Faber & Faber

The hard-hitting new poetry collection from Ireland's most ingenious poet has been shortlisted for the Poetry Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers Week. Very few poets, living or otherwise, can combine high-speed wit, tongue-twisting alliteration, and dizzying rhyme with the kind of insight that makes us pause, laugh, remember; feel envious, out of breath, punch-drunk. Kit Fan, Guardian, A howdie-skelp is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an affront to good taste. Paul Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to hold our attention.

Weight: 220g
Dimension: 197 x 130 x 14 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780571365784
Edition number: Main