COMING TO LABYRINTH: Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon will be at Labyrinth Books reading from his new collection “One Thousand Things Worth Knowing” (Farrar Strauss & Giroux $24) on Wednesday, March 4, at 6 p.m.

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon will be at Labyrinth Books reading from his new collection One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (Farrar Strauss & Giroux $24) on Wednesday, March 4, at 6 p.m.

According to Fran Brearton in the Guardian, “No one can do this kind of involved poetic narrative better than Muldoon. The connections made are apparently serendipitous, and all the more compelling for that. His technical and linguistic brilliance is probably second to none; the poems are the textual equivalent of a high-wire act, with juggling. So expected now, indeed, may be his virtuoso handling of the unexpected, that the moments which genuinely shock can be those slightly jarring lines where the poet chooses to expose himself at ground level, without the tricks of the trade.”

Publishers Weekly says “these densely worked poems are meant to be re-read … powerful … with witty pleasures and strong feelings to be unlocked and cherished.

Subjects include smuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie, 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.

Nick Laird, writing in The New York Review of Books, calls Muldoon “the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets,” an experimenter and craftsman who “writes poems like no one else.”

Paul Muldoon is professor at Princeton University and founding chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He is poetry editor of The New Yorker. His more recent collections are Poems 1968-1998, Moy Sand and Gravel, Horse Latitudes, and Maggot. In addition to the Pulitzer, he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Shakespeare Prize, the Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the European Prize for Poetry.

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