Joy in Service on Rue Tagore

''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 1970''s.'' Irish Post

Joy In Service On Rue Tagore, Muldoon''s fifteenth single collection, sees him writing with the same verve and distinction that have consistently won him the highest accolades. Here, from artichokes to zinc, he navigates an alphabet of image and history, through barleymen and Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster. The search involves the accumulated bric-a-brac of a life, and a reckoning along the way of gains against loss. In Muldoon¿s skilful hands, ancient maps are unfurled and brought into focus ¿ the aggregation of Imperial Rome and the dismantling of Standard Oil, the pogroms of a Ukrainian ravine and of a Belfast shipyard. Through modern medicine and warfare, disaster and repair, these poems are