Horse Latitudes: Poems [Hardcover]

Paul Muldoon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374173052 | ISBN-13: 978-0374173050 | Publication Date: October 3, 2006 | Edition: First Edition

The title of Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to be becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day. From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. Horse Latitudes is a triumphant new collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Muldoon is undisputedly a master poet. Many of his poems distinctly take up the poetic tradition yet skew it with half-rhymes and unlikely subjects for classical forms, and also engage deeply with the troubled politics of his native Northern Ireland yet intertwine them with Muldoon's own personal history, mythology and esoteric symbolism. If these poems are reluctant to offer themselves to easy interpretation, they nonetheless seduce the reader into repeated readings in which they only grow more interesting, a sure sign of their capacity to last. In his 11th collection, the Pulitzer Prize–winner and former professor of poetry at Oxford (his Oxford lectures are being released concurrently) is as good as ever. Amid the usual parade of poetic forms (a riddle, haiku and pantoum, among others), he treats post-9/11 America ("those were my Twin Towers, right?"); aging, fatherhood and mortality ("a country toward which I've been rowing/ for fifty years"); the notion of "the old country" in a tour-de-force crown of sonnets ("Every escape was a narrow escape/ where every stroke was a broad stroke/ of an ax on a pig nape./ Every pig was a pig in a poke"); and the deaths of his sister and rocker Warren Zevon. With signature wit, Muldoon is preoccupied with the passage of time, the ways things change and stay the same, the distance between one culture and another, as well as the narrowing gap between high and popular culture. (Oct.)
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Review

"Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down . . . Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does. . .authentically touched or delighted." -Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review

"Without question one of the most inventive poets writing in English today." -Andrew Frisardi, The Boston Sunday Globe

Praise for Moy Sand and Gravel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize:

"Moy Sand and Gravel, Muldoon's ninth book of poems in twenty years, shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information over ordinary experiences, the play of observation and sensuous detail, of motion upon custom, of Irish and English languages and landscapes, of meter and rhyme." -Peter Davison, The New York Times Book Review

"[Moy Sand and Gravel] demonstrate[s] why [Muldoon] is regarded by many as the most sophisticated and original poet of his generation . . . dazzling." -Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books

"Certainly one of the most beguiling and delightful of writers." -The Economist

"A glittering vindication of complexity." -Brian Dillon, Time Out

"Fanciful, brief, strong and sprung by twinkle-eyed winks at the readers' intelligence, these poems will certainly stand the test of time, and of many readings." -John Freeman, The Seattle Times

"Paul Muldoon is the most original Irish poet of his generation . . . Muldoon's voice, with its taste for meaty unpronounceables and querulous urgencies, it like no other in contemporary poetry. While it distinguishes him from his acknowledged mentor Seamus Heaney and other brilliant Irish rhetoricians, it also establishes an honored place among them." -William Doreski, Harvard Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (October 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374173052
• ISBN-13: 978-0374173050
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,664,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars always glad to have more muldoon, November 2, 2006

By 

L. Belz "syzygy" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Horse Latitudes: Poems (Hardcover)

I felt that this book exceeds Moy Sand and Grave in quality. It evokes some of the mystery of Muldoon's previous work. Many of his poems are densely inscrutable, yet somehow utterly compelling. One often gets the impression that he may be obliquely referencing things beyond what is immediately offered in the writing. ...but I am not much of a scholar: is there a skeleton key?

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Joyce voice, March 19, 2009

By 

J. D. Muller (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Horse Latitudes: Poems (Paperback)

Muldoon reads like Finnegans Wake: multilingual interlocking wordplay, principally puns, allusions and ironic twists on common expressions. The novel's conceit is philology, that language packs in itself the psychology and history of human beings, and that fictional characters, Ireland, and world history can be lined up just right by and with purling wordplay to challenge science, social or even physical, in its ability to discover truth. But what if you're post-modern even in the minimal sense that such a theory was an inflationary bubble that blew up in the last century and that puns, allusions and spun idioms can be used to document middle-class life, enhancing it like sugar eggs' elaborate confectionery adds to the eerie realism of the miniatures inside them? Or you might find crossword fun in figuring out obvious answers from clever clues, a bonus in storytelling like the physical beauty of movie stars in real-people roles. If you enjoy the Joycean for any of the reasons above, or in some fuzzy combination, you should try mulling over Muldoon for he's the best living practitioner of that distinctive art.

3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Modernist doggerel, March 5, 2008

By 

Susan Lockrey - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Horse Latitudes: Poems (Paperback)

Oh this is just too awful for words. Utterly tedious subject matter embalmed in hiply snide erudition [lazy obscurity with just enough reference points to thrill the trainspotters] and about as poetic as the drivel one has come to expect from an earnest Creative Writing Seminar student. Why has someone like Muldoon been elevated to his present position in the Pantheon of Contemporary Poets ... It can't be true, but yes it is ... Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. Dear oh dear. It's amateur-hour for post-modernist kiddies who've attended a hundred too many Writers' Festivals. Watch out Charlie Simic and Adam Zagajewski. My beloved New Yorker will be exiling you soon for being readable, using apposite metaphors, and actually having something to write about. Gee, come to think of it, even John Ashbery with his flippantly surrealistic collage might be too disagreeably poetic for the new door nazis. Paul Muldoon is a professional poet in all the worst senses.