Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems his first since Hay (1998) finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s in which he was brought up to suburban New Jersey on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies where he now lives. Grounded glistening as gritty as they are graceful these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything and anybody be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border Bessie Smith Marilyn Monroe Queen Elizabeth I a hunted hare William Tell William Butler Yeats Sitting Bull Ted Hughes an otter a fox Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne un unearthed pit pony a loaf of bread an outhouse a killdeer Oscar Wilde or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child and that elegiac tone predominates particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes where a welter of traffic signs and slogans along with the spirits of admen hardware storekeepers flimflammers fixers and other forebears are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age. Moy Sand and Gravel is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
