Graduating with an “allowed fail,” he “‘ran away to the BBC’/as poets did” and stayed there thirteen years. While still an undergraduate at Queens University, Belfast, Muldoon published his first collection, New Weather (1973).

To deal in the off-, the under-, the sleight-of-hand…. She would say, “spoil the broth.” My father took no hand We meet a version of her in “They That Wash on Thursday,” where a plangent autorhyme forces varying cadences of sadness or anger: The Catholic Church, Muldoon has said, “presided over almost every aspect of our lives, both literally-the building itself was two fields away-and metaphorically.” The repressive society was replicated domestically, and his relationship with his mother, who died in 1973, appears to have been fraught. Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951 to a schoolmistress and a market gardener, and raised as a Roman Catholic in Collegelands, a small town near the staunchly Protestant village of Loughgall, where the Orange Order was founded in 1795. The most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, he writes poems like no one else. (In Stepping Stones Heaney clarified, slightly: “The letter, as I remember it, said ‘Perhaps you can tell me where I am going wrong’ I wrote back saying that I didn’t think I could tell him anything he wouldn’t find out for himself.”) Part of this mystique (as The Anthologist makes clear) has recently been due to Muldoon’s influential position as poetry editor of The New Yorker-but the work itself is at the heart of it.

Later the schoolboy sent his poems to the older poet, asking what he was doing wrong the reply came “Nothing,” or so the story goes.

Muldoon is a fabled beast-or a rara avis, as his teacher Jerry Hicks termed him when introducing his charge to Seamus Heaney. Suddenly word flew through the room like wildfire-Paul Muldoon was here! Paul Muldoon! Paul Muldoon! He was besieged. In Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist (2009), the eponymous hero attends a poetry festival in Switzerland. This bookplate and the one on page 66 are collected in Martin Hopkinson’s Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates, just published by Yale University Press. Bookplate designed by Thomas Sturge Moore for Campbell Dodgson, keeper of the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, 1909.

Felt poem of the river rar