Description
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 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 the very idea of an ‘affront’ to good taste.
The Detective Dog 
Strong in the Rain 
Counting Backwards 
Words the Turtle Taught Me 
Book of Mercy 
New & Selected Potatoes