Slight Return: Paul Muldoon’s Poetics of Place

This volume examines the relationship between poetic language and place in the work of Paul Muldoon. Through a close reading of the formal and stylistic aspects of his poems, the book explores the question of how poetry as an art form can be engaged to map the complex exchanges between language and the material, phenomenal, personal and social dimensions of our sense of place. In particular, it demonstrates how various forms of repetition and return, in language and memory, are crucial to Muldoon’s approach to place and landscape. Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of the poet’s work: the naming of place; the genre of the long poem; poetry, music and nostalgia; and, finally, the place of poetry in the information age.

Anne Karhio holds a PhD in English from the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has published a number of critical essays and journal articles on Irish poetry and co-edited Crisis and Contemporary Poetry (2001). She is currently a holder of the Irish Research Council’s ELEVATE International Career Development Fellowship, co-funded by the European Commission via Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Her research project Virtual Landscapes: Poetics of Place in Recent Irish Poetry is being carried out at the University of Bergen and NUI Galway.