A "howdie-skelp" is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action.
The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon's new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an "affront" to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to hold our attention.
"[A] storm of slaps against piety, prudery, cruelty and greed . . . Like Eliot, Muldoon's after big, apocalyptic vision; unlike Eliot, Muldoon is willing"
no, compelled
"Truly, is there any living poet with as skilled and rambunctious an ear as Paul Muldoon? . . . One of the pleasures of Muldoon's poems is the way they make reality seem to go right to the verge of surrealism, the very shaky lip of it. How does he do it?"
