"The most significant English-Language poet born since the second world war." —The Times Literary SupplementSelected Poems 1968–2014 offers forty-five years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who "began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso" (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as "one of the era's true originals," Paul Muldoon seems determined to escape definition, yet this volume, chosen by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual high jinks and emotional honesty. Among his many honors are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize "for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European inheritance.""Among contemporaries, Paul Muldoon, one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems—word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only...

Another wild, expansive collection from the eternally surprising Pulitzer Prize–winning poetSmuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie, yes, but also Lew Wallace's original book, and Seosamh Mac Grianna's Gaelic translation); a real trip to Havana; an imaginary trip to the Château d'If: Paul Muldoon's newest collection of poems, his twelfth, is exceptionally wide-ranging in its subject matter—as we've come to expect from this master of self-reinvention. He can be somber or quick-witted—often within the same poem: The mournful refrain of "Cuthbert and the Otters" is "I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead," but that doesn't stop Muldoon from quipping that the ancient Danes "are already dyeing everything beige / In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories." If this masterful, multifarious collection does have a theme, it is watchfulness. "War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal," he warns in...