Howdie-Skelp by Paul Muldoon

Howdie-Skelp by Paul MuldoonA '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 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

Mostly plants

Claudia has never been in love this before either

from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves

it really touched my young bird-loving heart

A hunter pursues the last dinosaur through a remote rainforest

but post-9/11 America will not let him in

and when you do

Everyone has the potential to be happy

In these six incisive essays

the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled promises

Few places are as familiar as the shore - and few as full of mystery and surprise

John Wood and Markus Zusak