One Thousand Things Worth Knowing

Another wild expansive collection from the eternally surprising Pulitzer Prize–winning poetSmuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie yes but also Lew Wallace''s original book and Seosamh Mac Grianna''s Gaelic translation); a real trip to Havana; an imaginary trip to the Château d''If: Paul Muldoon''s newest collection of poems his twelfth is exceptionally wide-ranging in its subject matter―as we''ve come to expect from this master of self-reinvention. He can be somber or quick-witted―often within the same poem: The mournful refrain of Cuthbert and the Otters is I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead but that doesn''t stop Muldoon from quipping that the ancient Danes are already dyeing everything beige / In anticipation perhaps of the carpet and mustard factories.If this masterful multifarious collection does have a theme it is watchfulness. War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal he warns in Recalculating. And Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt. Heedful hard-won head-turning heartfelt these poems attempt to bring scrutiny to bear on everything including scrutiny itself. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing confirms Nick Laird''s assessment in The New York Review of Books that Muldoon is the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets an experimenter and craftsman who writes poems like no one else.