Paul Muldoon Biography

Northern Irish poet, born in Co. Armagh, educated at Queen's University, Belfast, where Seamus Heaney was among his lecturers. He worked as a radio producer with the BBC in Northern Ireland until 1986. After holding a succession of posts as writer-in-residence in Britain and America, he became a lecturer at Princeton University in 1990. His considerable reputation was established by the freshness and stylistic individuality evident in New Weather (1973), his first substantial collection of poetry; subsequent volumes include Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), and The Prince of Quotidian (1994). The long title poem of Madoc, which conflates real and imagined histories of North America, forms the culmination of his interest in the possibilities of narrative experimentation. An uneasy sense of the tensions between his inherited Irishness and his immediate Ulster background informs much of Muldoon's earlier work. The imaginative deftness and buoyant openness of tone with which he handled such material gained his verse recognition as an innovative extension of Ulster poetry. Selected Poems: 1968–1983 appeared in 1986. Muldoon is the editor of The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986). Shining Brow (1993) is an opera libretto about Frank Lloyd Wright.