I remember well when I was starting off, back in
I’ve noticed in the past with albums that have become favourites that I find myself unable to proceed to track two before I’ve listened to track one over and over again, and so it is with this book. So as I continue to digest its contents, let me give some idea of JQ’s capacity for penetrating directly to the heart of the matter, critically. These should get you on your toes. File under whip-cracks:
1. Of Patrick Kavanagh: ‘Kavanagh’s achievement is restricted to a handful of poems which anthologists of two generations have agreed upon. Exploring his work outside this number is a dismal experience.’
2. Of Brian Coffey: ‘It is difficult to see justification for the claims that Coffey is an experimental poet in any meaningful sense; certainly, bizarre punctuation and spacing of words do not in themselves constitute originality.’
3. Of recent Muldoon: ‘That it is clotted with self-parody is deliberate, but such an intention is not enough to forestall the feeling that Muldoon has reached a difficult juncture in his explorations of autobiography. No matter how far-flung the reference or the rhyme we are always landed back with Muldoon, his Irish mother and father, his American wife and children. No world seems to exist beyond the garden fence. One imagines Muldoon’s house in
Buy this marvellous book.
Photo found here.
1 comment:
I love the phrase "Muldoon’s house in New Jersey." If you come from my neck of the woods that about says it all.
Yours, not at all prejudiced,
Ms B
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