Paul Muldoon in Conversation with Lucy McDiarmid

Slightly Magical Irish Poetry and the Long 1990s is a major intervention in the field of Irish literary studies, disrupting conventional divisions and interpretive categories, mixing established poets and new ones, and including poems in English and Irish. McDiarmid argues convincingly for the importance of the ontologically ambiguous or ‘slightly magical’ mode in recent Irish poetry. She brings her wealth of knowledge in the field of Irish literary and cultural criticism to bear on subjects as whimsical as cats, railroad reveries and hair, and as serious as political critiques of both Irelands during the upheavals of the 1990s. Drawing on the author’s conversations with the poets themselves, the book is written in a style that is witty and learned, sophisticated but always accessible.

Lucy McDiarmid, Hon MRIA, is a scholar and writer. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and was the first Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University. Her scholarly interest in cultural politics, especially quirky, colorful, suggestive episodes, is exemplified by The Irish Art of Controversy (2005) and Poets and the Peacock Dinner: the literary history of a meal (2014), which appeared in paperback in October 2016. She is a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. At Home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916 received the History Book of the Year bronze award from Foreward Reviews' 2016 INDIEFAB.

Paul Muldoon is the author of fifteen collections of poetry including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Among his other awards are the 1994 T. S Eliot Prize, the 2003 Griffin Prize, the 2015 Pigott Prize, and the 2017 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in Country Armagh in 1951, he has lived since 1987 in the United States, where he is the Howard G.B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. In 2022 he was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry.

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