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Paul Muldoon & Michael Longley, Introduced by Olivia O’Leary

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In 1974, the inaugural Kilkenny Arts Festival welcomed two young, tousle-haired northern poets. One of them was Seamus Heaney, the other was Paul Muldoon. Muldoon has been described as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War” (The Times Literary Supplement). Now a professor at Princeton, as well as Poetry Editor for the New Yorker, he continues to add to a body of work that has already garnered the TS Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the European Prize for Poetry and a Pulitzer. His latest collection, Maggot, is “like an intellectual fairground ride, with daring swoops and hairpin turns of thought.” (The Guardian)

“If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there,” Michael Longley once observed, during a prolonged spell of writer’s block. Over the last twenty years, he has found his way there time and again in a burst of creativity that includes Gorse Fires, winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award; The Weather in Japan, which won the Hawthornden Prize, the TS Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize; and Snow Water. He has received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, a CBE, the Wilfred Owen Award and was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010. His most recent collection, A Hundred Doors, has an intimate feel, with poems dedicated to his grandchildren, lost friends, his father, and to his wife, the literary critic Edna Longley. “These poems are like talismans;” wrote Kate Kellaway in The Observer, “you want to learn them off by heart.”

Reviews

Muldoon...has an ear as industrious and alert as that of any poet working in the language today.
- The Irish Times

A Hundred Doors should both satisfy and surprise Michael Longley's admirers. It reaffirms (if this were ever necessary) his place in the trio of outstanding Irish poets of the past half-century.
- The London Times