Derek Mahon was born in , North lreland, in t94t. He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin. His books of poetry include The Hudson Letter (Wake Forest University Press, 1996); Selected Poems (1993); The Yadda Letter (t992); Selected Poems (1991); Antarctica (1985); A Kensington Notebook (t98,a); The Hunt by Night (1982); Courtyards in Delft (1981); poems, 1962-1978 (1979); The Sea in Winter (1979); In Their Element: A Selection of Poems (with , t977); Light Music (t977); The Snow Party (L975); The Man Who Built His City in Snow (1972); Lives (t97z); Beyond Howth Head (1970); Ecclesíastes (1970); Night-Crossing (1968); Design far a Grecian Llrn (1967); and Twelve Poems (1965). Derek Mahon's published plays include The Bacchae: After (1991), The Schoal for Wives: a play in two acts after Moliére (1986), and High Time, an adaptation of a play by Moliére. He has also edited Ifie Penguin Book of Contemporary (1990) and Modern Irish Paetry G97Z). He has translated Racine's Phaedra (1996); Selected Poenls by Philip ]accottet (1987), which won the Scott-Manriet Translation Prize; and lhe Chimeras by Nerval (1982). His honors include the lrish American Foundation Award, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Arts Council Bursary, and the .

rllI: SN()l\, í,/\íi IY

ECCLESIASTES for Louis Astko|f

God, you could grow to love it, God-fearing, God- I}.lslró, ctrrllirrg chosen purist little puritan ihat, Ttr tI11, 611r. tlf N.lgtlya, for all your wiles and smiles, you are (the Is askctl t() a sn()1r, part),. dank churches, the empty §treets, the slripyard silence, the tied-up swings) and 1'hcrc is a tiIrkliIlg t>f clrina shelter your cold heart from the heat Atltl tt,a irtttl clrina, 'I of the world, fronr wonran-inquisition, from the Itcrc .rrc intrtltluctiotls. bright eyes of children. Yes you could wear black. drink water, nourish a fierce zeal l'itert cvcrytlne with locusts and wild honey, and not crtlrvcls to tlre w,indotv feel called upon to understand and forgive To rvatch thc íalling snorv. but only to speak with a bleak afflatus, and love the }anuary rains when they Stltlrv is falIing on Nagoya darken the dark doors and sink hard Arlcl íartllcr s

TlrousaIrds lrave died since clawn Irr the service Of barbarous kings -

IJut thcre is silence Itr tltc lrtrttsts tlf Nagoya And tIre lrills clf lse. |' '= *l,-, ii í.i],liT ?*o ilu +,,i i ,:i

,!!;xir,;;jqlr:;;:3.s:rl;1,.g Born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 25 January L949, poet, critic and playwright Tom (Thomas Neilson) Paulin was raised in Belfast in Northern lreland where his father was the headmaster of a grammar school, and his mother was a doctor, He was educated at Hull University and Lincoln College, Oxford.

He lectured in English at the University of Nottingham from L97Z until 1989, and was Reader in Poetry from 1989 until 1994. He was a director of Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern lreland. He has also taught at the University of Virginia and was Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Reading. He is now G. M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. He is a well-known broadcaster and a regular member of the panel for the BBC Television arts programme'Newsnight Review'.

Much of his early poetry reflects the political situation in Northern Ireland and the sectarian violence which has beset the province since the late 1960s. His collections include A State of ]ustíce (L977), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Strange Museum (1980), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Liberty lree (1983) and the acclaimed Fivemíletown (1987), which explores Northern Irish Protestant culture and identities. Later collections include Walking a Line (1994) and Ifre Wind Dag (1999), which was shottlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, The Invasion Handbook (2aa2) is the first instalment of an epic poem about the Second World War,

His non-fiction includes Ireland and the English Crísis (1984), Mínotaur: Poetry and the Natíon Sfafe (1992) and Ihe Day-Star of Liberty: 's Radícal Swle (1998), a critical study of the nineteenth*century essayist and radical.

Tom Paulin is editor of The Faber Book of Polítical Verse (1986) and lhe Faber Book af Vernacular Poetry (1990). His plays include The Riot Act: A Version of Sophacles' Antigane, which toured lreland in 1984, and All the Way to the Empire Room which was broadcast by the BBC in 1994.

Tom paulin lives in oxford with his wife and two sons.

r:: €;i".j..:ii? ?|" :',,.!n ( i n a l p h a betica t o rde r) Biography, Crjticism. Drama, Essays, Non-fiction, Poetry, Radio drama

Theoretical Locations Ulsterman Publications, 1975 Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception Macmillan , 1975 A State ofJustice , L977 Personal Column Ulsterman Publications, 1978 The Strange Museum Faber and Faber, 1980 The Book of Juniper Bloodaxe, 1981 Liberty Tree Faber and Faber, 1983 A New Look at the Language Question Field Day, 1983 Ireland and the English Crisis Bloodaxe, t9B4 The Argument at Great Tew: A Poem Willbrook Press, 1985 The Riot Actl A Version of ' Antigone Faber and Faber, 1985 Fivemiletown Faber and Faber, L9B7 The Hillsborough Script: A Dramatic Satire Faber and Faber, 1987 The Faber Book of Political Verse (editor) Faber and Faber, 1990 The Faber Book of Vernacular Poetry (editor) Faber and Faber, 1990 Seize the Fire: A Version of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound Faber and Faber, 1990 Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State Faber and Faber, t99Z Selected Poems 1972-1990 Faber and Faber, 1993 Walking a Line Faber and Faber, t994 Writing to the Momentl Selected Critical Essays 1980-1996 Faber and Faber, 1996 The Day-§tar of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style Faber and Faber, 199B The Wind Dog Faber and Faber, 1999 The Fight and other lítíritings by William Hazlitt (co-editor with David Chandler) Penguin, 2000 Thomas Hardyl Poems selected by Tom Paulin (editor) Faber and Faber, 2001 The Invasion Handbook Faber and Faber,2aO2

ii",,,";;,,,:,:,:.l',;., - :_,,,i,,,-,,,i1,1,,',"',;'i,,,l,,i *' L976 Eric Gregory Award 1978 §omerset Maugham Award A State of Justíce 1982 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize The Strange Museum 1999 T. S, Eliot Prize (shortlist) The Wínd Dog

-,,, li i,,i,::lj i,,li l,.;i,i;:1 _ ,, , l' i: :1 i :': lil i,':1;;: i,:: ,,1 ,;, Tom Paulin is a poet whose work more or less divides in two, the earlier work, first published in A State of }ustice {1977), is taut and political, evoking an Ulster as grim as Eastern Europe:

'The city is built on mud and wrath, Its weather predicted, its streetlamps Light up in the glowering, crowded evenings. Time switches, ripped from them, are clamped To sticks of sweet, sweating explosive.'

('Under the Eyes')

This is very much a young man's book and he sometimes strikes a note reminiscent of early '.,.,up here, I'm free í and know a type of power, a certain kind of law' ('Under a Roof). In The Strange Museum (t980), his scope becomes more imaginative/ more fiction-making. In 'Second Rate Republics' the place could be anywhere where urban alienation rules: flats with 'a dull ripe smell of gas, l a pile of envelopes fading / on the hall table'.

Liber$ Iree (1983) focuses more explicitly on Northern Ireland but a tendency appears for the first time to introduce vernacular words 'fremd', 'neapish'. In t994 Paulin edited The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse (1990) and he became a great advocate and practitioner of both vernacular and coined words, the existing dictionary words being inadequate for his task.

'Desertmartin' is one of his most eloquent evocations of the bleakest kind of ulster unionism:

'Here the word has withered to a few Parched certainties, and the charred stubb|e Tightens like a black belt, a crop of Bibles.'

The change in Paulin's style was signalled 'I am Nature: Homage to ]ackson Pollock 1912-56' in Fivemiletown (1987). This is a free-ranging poem that attempts to conjure the improvisatory processes of the celebrated 'action' painter. :

'You know I pushed my Soft bap Out her funky vulva Her black thighs Was Scotch-Irish A scrake A scratch A screighulaidagh'

Tom Paulin's writing entered a new, prolific phase with Walking a Líne (t994) and continued with The Wind Dog (1999). His style was free, unbuttoned, using many coined words to convey the improvisatory nature of thought,In Walkíng a Line, he is like D. H. Lawrence in trying to capture the essences of things in free verse. In lhe Wind Dog the poems often proceed by free association, rather as 's do in the title poem 'cargo cult' leads him to Masefield's poem and then via the word 'cheap' to the 'clishclash' of 'cheapo rings on a curtain pole'. The improvisatons of Paul Klee and the highly coloured vernacular of the painter Marc Chaga]l are important inspirations in these books. The old, political Paulin is still in there, though, In 'Marc Chagall, Over the Town', about the famous painting in which a couple are flying entwined over the village, he notices in the corner of the painting a peasant relieving himself, and comments on how we often choose to ignore certain uncomfortable aspects of an artist's work. In this case he reminds us that certain passages in the poetry of T. S. Eliot are anti- Semitic,

In many of these poems he is trying to conjure the feel of things by exploring all the senses, His poem about Chagall's village, 'Vitebsk', comments that the word 'sounds like stubbing your big toe - no not quite / more like someone smashing / a fence down - its the crash / of flimsy timber breaking like the laths / in a plaster ceiling...'

The link between early and late Paulin is that he is always concerned with states of order and disorder. Order predominated in the early poems, and disorder in the latter. The poem 'Cuas' in The Wind Dog makes this preoccupation explicit. The poem is about a big leather bag that flops around shapelessly, and this bothers him:

'But what interests me Is my own unease And the way that unease Is close to thinking to a dull dreamless sleep state of collapse Or even a last gasp'

The bag 'has to be tamed or strapped' otherwise it has no form nor pattern'. Wrestling with the bounds of form and pattern has become his subject.

In 2000 he was awarded a National Foundation for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) grant to complete a long poem about the Second World War. The first volume, The Invasion Handbook was published in Spring Zaaz. o peter Forbes 'I'm efreid I can't come up with anythin9 wonderfully witty and wise to say about my work, except to wish that it displayed a shade more wit or wisdom.

The truth is that I hardly ever read it, let alone theorise on it. I'm much less interested in what I've done, which almost certainly amounts to very little, than with what I might do which will almost certainly not amount to much more.

I'll keep trying, nonetheless.'

-i1, i r-.-*, ," -," :., ," , i,-:,11j1..J ! i'! *r-Y Paul*Muldoon *., born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1951. He read English at Queen's University, Belfast, where he was taught by Seamus Heaney. His first collection of poems, New Weather, was published in L973, while he was still at university. He worked for the BBC in Belfast until 1986, before taking up a writer's residency at Cambridge University. He moved to the USA shortly afterwards to teach at Columbia and Princeton universities. He is Howard G.B. Clark Professor of the Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University. He became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1999, succeeding James Fenton, and is President of the Poetry Society in London

His poetry collections include Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Annals of Chile (1994), which includes an elegy to the artist Mary Farl Powers and won the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Hay (I99B), /Vew Selected Poems 1968-1994 (1996) won the /rlsh Tímes Literature Prize for Poetry. He is editor of The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986) and wrote the libretto for Shining Brow (1993), an opera about the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright with music by Daron Aric Hagen. He delivered the Oxford Clarendon Lectures in 1988, published as Io lreland, / (2000), and his translation of poems in Irish by Nuala NÍ Dhomhnaill was published in The Astrakhan Cloak (1992). His most recent book of poetry, Moy Sand and Gravel (2OO2), has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Paul Muldoon lives with his wife, the novelist ]ean Hanff Korelitz, and their two children in the us. Ja

!j,-si!;l,r::;e'}^ix*z:,:*.;v:{:r;?;.i,+:r,* paul Muldoon is the most playful, allusive and inventive poet now writing. He began as a precocious 2l-year-old with New Weather (t973), poems that clearly came from the same rural lrish territory as Seamus Heaney's but which had an airy, incantatory myth-making quality'The seed that goes into the ground / After the first cuckoo / Is said to grow short and light l As the beard of a boy'.

In its first poem, 'Lunch with Pancho Vila', his second book Mules (1977) introduced an element that would run through all his subsequent work: picaresque narratives in which the Trouble of Northern Ireland are treated in an oblique way: 'There's more to living in thís country l Than stars and horses, pigs and trees. /Not that you'd guess it from your poems'. 'Cuba' introduces another key technique: the improbable yoking of events, often large compared with small. In 'Cuba'the confrontation between America and the USSR is a conversational backdrop to a girl's confessional 'Tell me, child, Was this touch immodest? | Did he touch your breast, for example?, / 'He brushed against me, Father, very gently'.

Why Brownlee Left (1980) is the last of what could be called the rura] books. The tile poem is a sonnet (Muldoon is particularly noted for his ingenious sonnets) with one of his most memorable images: Brownlee just vanished for good, leaving his two horses abandoned in their rig, 'Shifting their weight from foot to l Foot and gazing into the future'. Muldoon is also famous for his ingenious rhymes, such as 'foot to'/'future' (it helps to hear his brogue reading lines like this, ín which the rhyme become more apparent).

The last poem of Wíty Brownlee Left isthe first of his great long narrative poems 'Immram', a burlesque, mixing many ingredients that would come to seem characteristic: Amerindian folklore, psychedelic mushrooms, sex. The tone is reminiscent of the American crime writer Raymond Chandler: 'A girl who would never pass out of fashion l So long as there's an "if' in California'. Muldoon's career has often been divided in two, stylistically. The pinnacle of his early achievement is the volume Quoof (1983). The title poem is his most famous sonnet, a beguiling concoction with a unique music:

How often have I carried our family word For the hot water bottle To a strange bed As my father would juggle a red-hot half-brick In an old sock To his childhood settle.

In 'A Trifle' the Troubles are atluded to in a tremulously oblique manner: the poise that is broken by a bomb is maintained by 'a plate of btue-pink trifle l a jelly sponge, l with a dollop of whipped cream on top'. This book ends with another bravura long narrative: 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants'. This is the most explicit of his Troubles poems:

Once they collect his smithereens He doesn't quite add up. They're shy of a foot, and a calf 4 which stems From his left shoe like a severely Pruned-back shrub.

Meetíng the British (1987) was published just before his permanent move to America and has a long poem set in America, 'Seven Middagh Street' about the artistic communal house in New York in the 1940s inhabited by Auden, MacNeice, Benjamin Britten, and the stripper Gipsy Rose Lee, amongst others. 'Bechbretha' is one of the most Muldoonian treatments of lrish politics. The key to Muldoon's technique is the immense map of correspondences he sees between words: one word always leads to another. This is rather like the way that in intractable political situations one loaded phrase evokes another. In 'Bechbretha'the symbolic connotations of a beeswarm are investigated. The poem ends 'This, he said, is the very handkerchief / that Melmoth the Wanderer / left at the top of the cliff. This clinching the argument.

Madoc (1990) is Muldoon's most difficult book. The idea behind the poem is straightforward enough. In L794 the poets Coleridge and Southey conceived the idea of founding a utopian society on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Nothing came of this but Muldoon imagines that it did happen and the poem, over 200 pages, reflects not just on such ambitious political experiments but on the whole history of Western thought. Each poem has the title of a thinker, such as Marx, Hume, ]ohn Stuart Mill. The problem is that in many cases the poem is very hard to connect to its title. By now in his work it seems that one word can be associated with another purely by sound, The poem 'Pasteur' runs'The gelding's apishamore, meanwhile, is a languid / crimson mackinaw blanket', which is an intriguing word stew but hard to decipher,

The Annals of Chile (1994), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize, contains both his most accessible long poem - 'Incantata', a tribute to a dead friend, the artist Mary Farl Powers - and another narrative as baffling as Madoc: 'Yarrow'. ln Hay(1998) , Muldoon's 'sixties roots emerge in a series of poems about rock music'Sleeve Notes'. A clue to the way his mind works is the poem 'THE BEATLES: The Beatles' (this record usually known as The White Album) 'I'd never noticed the play on "album" and "white". It is very doubtful whether the Beatles noticed it, either. His word association is most evident in the poem 'Blissom', which tells '...how my mind would skip l/ from pegs to kegs to tegelmousted Tuaregs / while I peered through the skylight as if from an open tomb l at those five ewes and three whether-tegs'. His Collected Poems was published to great acclaim in the summer of 2001.

@ Peter Forbes 2

Names and Addresses Ulsterman Publications, 1978 The §crake of Dawn: Poems by Young People from Northern lreland (editor) Blackstaff Press in association with the Arts Council of Northern lreland, 1979 Immram Gallery Books, 1980 The 0-0's Party, New Year's Eve Gallery Books, 1980 Why Brownlee Left Faber and Faber, 1980 Out of Siberia Gallery Books, 1982 Quoof Faber and Faber, 1983 The Wishbone Gallery Books, 1984 The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (editor) Faber and Faber, 19B6 Paul Muldoonl Selected Poems 1968-1983 Faber and Faber, 1986 Faber and Faber, L987 lrladocl A Mystery Faber and Faber, 1990 The Astrakhan Cloak / Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (translator) Galtery Books, t992 Shining Brow Faber and Faber, 1993 The Annals of Chile Faber and Faber, t994 The Prince of the Quotidian Gallery Books, 1994 Six Honest Serving Men Gallery Books, 1995 Kerry §lides Gallery Books, 1996 The Last Thesaurus (illustrations by Rodney Rigby) Faber and Faber, 1996 New Selected Poems 1968-1994 Faber and Faber, 1996 The Faber Book of Beasts (editor) Faber and Faber, t997 Hopewell Haiku Warwick Press (US), 1997 The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt (illustrations by Markéta Prachatická) Faber and Faber,1997 Hay Faber and Faber, 1998 Bandannal An Opera in Two Acts and a Prologue Faber and Faber, 1999 The Birds (adaptation) Gallery Books, 1999 The End of the Poem: 'All Souls Night' by llUB Yeats (lecture) Oxford University Press, 2000 The Oxford and Cambridge May Anthologies 2OOO: Poetry (editor) Va rsity/Cherwell, 2000 To lreland, I Oxford University Press, 2000 Poems 1968-1998 Faber and Faber, 2001 Vera of Las Vegas Galtery Books, 2001 Paul Muldoon in conversation with Lavinia Greenlaw Between The Lines, 2a02 Moy Sand and Gravel Faber and Faber,2aO2

!i,!. :1 _i ,-,.,, _ t L992 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Madoc: A Mystery L994 T. S. Eliot Prize The Annals of Chíle 1997 lrish Times Literature Prize for Poetry íVepv Selected Poems 1968-1994 20a2 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Moy Sand and Gravel