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A major figure in English-language poetry for decades, Paul Muldoon has enjoyed one of the most successful careers of his generation His first collection was published when he was still an undergraduate at Queen’s University, Belfast Famously, Muldoon’s schoolteacher sent on a batch of his poems to Seamus Heaney (allegedly asking him what was ‘wrong with them’, to which Heaney replied, ‘Nothing’) and Heaney later recommended Muldoon’s work to his editor at Faber & Faber, Charles Monteith   The result was New Weather (1973), a collection of ballads, songs, and references to the apparently inconsequential artefacts of everyday life Muldoon has since written eleven collections of verse, won a Pulitzer Prize for Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), and taught poetry at Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of East Anglia He moved to the United States in 1987, and presently serves as poetry editor of The New Yorker and a Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, from where his latest book, The Word on the Street – a collection of rock lyrics written for his band the Wayside Shrines – takes its details of New Jersey life and lore   Paul Muldoon doesn’t like to go over old ground To read his poetry is to grow familiar with his presiding conviction that poetry comes in innumerable, changing forms The ludic wit, the acute sensitivity to what and how words mean, the verbal agility, and the freewheeling juxtapositions of diction – from the intellectual arcane to the low and demotic – permeate his work But its protean quality is most clearly manifest in the handful of books he’s published since moving to the United States In the book-length poem ‘Madoc’, in Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Muldoon supposes that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey take up their fancy of founding a Pantisocratic community in North America – perhaps dramatising his own geographic relocation – in short sections named after different philosophers, diagrams, and the odd snatching of coherent narrative The Annals of Chile (1994) develops the form of pseudo-autobiography explored in Madoc, as it imagines the life Muldoon’s father, a one-time mushroom cultivator, might have