Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon to read acclaimed work at Flowerfield Arts Centre

Ireland Professor of Poetry and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Paul Muldoon, will present a reading of his acclaimed work on Friday, May 5 at Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart.

Muldoon was born in 1951 in Portadown, Co Armagh, and was raised near The Moy.

His mother was a schoolteacher and his father a farm labourer and market gardener.

He is the author of a number of poetry collections, including New Weather (1973), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), New Selected Poems: 1968-1994 (1996), Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, Horse Latitudes (2006), and most recently One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Selected Poems 1968-2104 (2016), and Frolic and Detour (2019).

He has also published collections of criticism, children’s books, opera libretti, song lyrics, and works for radio and television.

Muldoon’s poetry is known for its use of paradox: his poems are playful but serious, elusive but direct, innovative but traditional.

He uses traditional verse forms such as the sonnet, ballad, and dramatic monologue, but alters their length and basic structure, and uses rhyme and meter in innovative ways. His work is also notable for its layered use of conceit, allusion, and wit.

The cryptic wordplay present in many poems has often been called Joycean, but Muldoon himself has cited lyric poets such as Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Louis MacNeice as his major influences.

One of the youngest members of a group of Northern Irish poets — including Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon — who gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, Muldoon studied with Heaney as a student at Queen’s University in Belfast.

In 1971, at the age of 19, Muldoon completed his first short collection, Knowing My Place.

Two years later, he published New Weather, his first widely reviewed volume of poetry.

The book secured Muldoon’s place among Ireland’s finest writers and helped establish his reputation as an innovative new voice in English-language poetry.

Muldoon now resides in New York and published Howdie-Skelp by FSG and Faber and Faber in 2021.

He has been a professor at Princeton University for over three decades.

Muldoon’s contributions to poetry have earned him numerous accolades, including the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2017 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry, and the 2020 Michael Marks Award.

He is also an accomplished editor, critic, playwright, lyricist, and translator and is a Fellow of both the Royal Society for Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Times Literary Supplement has hailed him as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War”, while the Irish Post said: “To describe Paul Muldoon’s influence on contemporary poetry is like trying to assess the influence of The Beatles on post-war music; it’s to be seen and heard in the work of almost every British and Irish poet since the 1970s.”

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