Paul Muldoon

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 Paul Muldoon‘s striking new collection Howdie-Skelp 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. Paul is a poet who continues not only to capture, but to hold, compellingly, our attention.

The hard-hitting new poetry collection from ‘Ireland’s most ingenious poet. The Telegraph

Very few poets, living or otherwise, can combine high-speed wit, tongue-twisting alliteration and dizzying rhyme with the kind of insight that makes us pause, laugh, remember; feel envious, out of breath, punch-drunk. Kit Fan, The Guardian