Paul Benedict Muldoon

Irish poet, writer and librettist. Muldoon’s first collection of poetry, Knowing my Place, was published while he was a student at Queen’s University, Belfast. His later collection The Annals of Chile (1994) won the T.S. Eliot prize and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

your hand moving in such a deliberate arc
as you ground a lithographic stone
that your hand and the stone blurred to one

From ‘Incantation’ in The Annals of Chile (London: Faber & Faber, 1968)

Anseo, meaning here, here and now,
All present and correct,
Was the first word of Irish I spoke.

From ‘Anseo’ in Why Brownlee Left (London: Faber & Faber, 1980)