Howdie-Skelp: Poems, Paperback

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection. 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 Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon's astonishing 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. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to hold our attention.

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 years. He is the author of thirteen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems 1968-2014; and, most recently, Frolic and Detour.

• Dimensions: 208 x 135
• Author: Paul Muldoon
• Cover type: Paperback
• Publishing Year: 2022
• Publishing Month: 11
• Pages: 192
• Language: English
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Weight: 218 g