Kerry Slides - Hardcover

Muldoon, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 185235190X ISBN 13: 9781852351908

Publisher: Gallery Books, 1996

In Kerry Slides Paul Muldoon brings his gifts to bear on the Dingle peninsula of County Kerry, an area in which he has lived and to which he returns. His characteristically original observations and thrilling word plays, rooted here deep in the elemental beauty of the landscape and in its history, literature and mythology, are thrown into high relief by Bill Doyle's pictorial record of Dingle, its surrounding townlands, and the Blasket islands.

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About the Author:

Paul Muldoon teaches at Princeton University.

From Booklist:

One of Ireland's most inventive poets teams with a photographer, Bill Doyle, in a pun-entitled volume (the Kerry slide is a country dance, like the jig and the reel; Kerry slides are photos of that southwestern Irish county). Muldoon's short poems are only obliquely connected to Doyle's black-and-white photos: a poem juxtaposing a mythic heroine and contemporary water pollution is matched with a dance hall in which a map of Ireland and a poster of JFK witness old men in caps partnering young women in jeans. Muldoon's wild rhymes and witty wordplay encapsulate history, myth, language, and landscape--and their odd contradictions: "Norseman. Norman. Elizabethan knight. All wondered, / as they came down this road in search of plunder, / who could have made such a dreadful blunder; / surely a bridge goes over a river, not under?" Doyle's densely textured photos seem dreamlike despite their sharpness; his eye sees beyond the picturesque to the archetypal. This is an inspired collaboration. Patricia Monaghan

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