Maggot - Softcover

"Paul Muldoon is a shape-shifting Proteus to readers who try to pin him down . . . Those who interrogate Muldoon's poems find themselves changing shapes each time he does." --Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review

"[Maggot] is filled with haunting images of decay and doom, from hares grazing dangerously on a runway to a geisha's body found on a Japanese mountain ... Muldoon has recently said that he could give up poetry, but this book suggests it isn't giving up on him." --Patricia Monaghan, Booklist

"Mr. Muldoon revels in the disorder that wriggles beneath and below even the most rigid order ... His new work is a teeming infested book from a teeming, infested mind. It bucks what its author calls "this tiresome trend / towards peace and calm." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"[Maggot] is grim, grave, swashbuckling, and made from the marrow of English: there may be no more adaptable strong style in the language than Muldoon's." --Dan Chiasson

"In Maggot ... the endlessly inventive Paul Muldoon offers his usual sly puzzle disguised as poems ... [Muldoon] treats themes of sex, decay and death with startling, acrobatic wit." --Carmela Ciuraru, The Los Angeles Times

"Muldoon has been a major figure in English language poetry for decades. Despite being as established an established poet as the establishment will allow, there is the vivacity in this collection of a poet with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. Maggot is a rare marriage between the frantic radical energy of a rebellious youth and the sophistication of a master of the form." --Josh Cook, Bookslut

"The most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, he writes poems like no one else . . . [Maggot's] ingenious poems inform and explicate one another, sharing lines, imagery, even epigraphs . . . When Maggot, with a little pressure, opens up, what surfaces is a sad, acidic masterwork. It's about endings: of relationships, of lives. There's betrayal, sex, and violence (always linked in Muldoon) and the dominant trope of decomposition: cancers, sod farms, wayside shrines, even lepers . . . Maggot is enormously dexterous . . . a fine collection by one of our very finest poets." --Nick Laird, New York Review of Books

Of Plan B, which included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."