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 Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
Will Burns
Collected Poems