Howdie-Skelp

Paul Muldoon

County Armagh’s Paul Muldoon has distinguished himself as a daring, insightful, skillful poet, willing to fly into flights of fancy with alliterative cascades of language. The Princeton-based, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is also a melodious lyricist who has written opera librettos and rock stanzas. Some years ago, Muldoon gave a joint reading with singer/songwriter Paul Simon at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, where the similarities in their approach to crafting a perfect line was thrilling to hear. Muldoon’s latest collection, Howdie- Skelp, continues the poet’s audacious forays into whimsical and serious language with particular relevance to our time of COVID-19, bad manners, pop culture and historical episodes that need resolution. The phrase ‘howdie-skelp’ is “the slap in the face a mid-wife gives a newborn. It’s a wakeup call. A call to action,” according to the jacket notes, and for Muldoon, that’s what his poetry is all about.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 192 pages / $27 / 2021