A 'howdie-skelp' is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call
to action. The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of
The Waste Land an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson a crown of sonnets
that responds to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic a translation from the ninth-century
Irish and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an
'affront' to good taste. Paul Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to hold
our attention.
