To Ireland, I [Paperback]

Paul Muldoon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2008

The four pieces that make up this work are taken from Muldoon's Oxford Clarendon Lectures of 1998. Together, they take the form of an A-Z, or abecedary of Irish literature, in which his imagination forges links between disparate aspects and individuals in the Irish literary landscape, ranging back and forth between modern and medieval. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift and Yeats - and guided throughout by Joyce - "To Ireland, I" moves lightly through the long grass of Irish writing. The result is a provocative handbook for the literary traveller, who is treated to an astonishing display of scholarship and idiosyncratic inwardness from Irish literature over the course of a millennium.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A more far-fetched, eye-opening, and stimulating survey of Irish literature would be difficult to imagine. Informal and esoteric, scholarly and playful, the book is both an idiosyncratic encyclopedia and a secret history of unsuspected imaginative tendencies and possibilities....An instructive and thoroughly enjoyable work of imagination."--The Irish Herald

"[To Ireland, I] is practically continuous with [Muldoon's] poems, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run it proves to be nearly as profound and inexhaustibly bountiful as they... Muldoon's stylishness, playfulness, and sheer erudition are impressive.... To Ireland, I stands as both testament and monument to that most fundamental of artistic rights, the right to freedom of association (association of ideas, that is). Muldoon's books, like Joyce's, are not to be devoured or comprehended all at once; rather, they are to remain always there, a part of the landscape to which we readers--if we are wise and fortunate readers--will return again and again."--Troy Jollimore, The Boston Book Review

"To Ireland, I is a quirky and playful book, much as one might expect from Muldoon. It complements his own poetry (well aware of tradition, but always experimenting), without giving too much away. It is also a different view of Irish literature than one might be used to, and valuable for that additional perspective."--The Complete Review

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) and Horse Latitudes (2006). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1996.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (April 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571238696
• ISBN-13: 978-0571238699
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,920,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great poets are not always great critics, July 31, 2000

By 

Joseph S. O'Leary - See all my reviews

This review is from: To Ireland, I (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature) (Hardcover)

I am bemused and rather disappointed with this book. Muldoon uses intertextual associativeness to generate wonderful poems -- touching, comic, and stylistically breath-taking. Here he uses the same method in a critical rhapsody that links together a galaxy of Irish literary texts and legends, arranged (or disarranged) in alphabetical order. He moves freely and funnily between Gaelic and English, ancient and modern, biographical and textual. The performance is carried off with brio, in a manner that recalls certain experiments in randomness of Roland Barthes. Unfortunately, many of the allusions Muldoon finds are so farfetched as to make one wince as at a bad pun. He circles around Joyce's "The Dead," adding one or two valid observations to what allusion-hunters have already noted, but otherwise sending readers off on a wild goose chase. Unlike Seamus Heaney, who is a great, authoritative, and highly trained literary critic, Muldoon does not project from his distinctive poetic sensibility a capacious literary critical vision. He flogs to death the idea of "conglomewriting" as a distinctively Irish practice, culminating in Finnegans Wake, but he offers little serious reflection on what the literary value of this practice might be. For that one must turn to works like Gerard Genette's Palimpsestes, which offers a careful and thorough examination of the ancient art of intertextual composition. Professorial pedants will find consolation in the thought that poets may need their services after all.