Joy in Service on Rue Tagore: Poems

Paul Muldoon’s Joy in Service on Rue Tagore is a new collection of poems in which the celebrated poet explores history, memory, language, culture, and personal and collective pasts.

Through a wide-ranging alphabet of imagery—from artichokes to zinc, from Irish slavers to the last running wolf in Ulster—Muldoon navigates the “accumulated bric-a-brac of a life” and reckons with gains and losses.

Ancient maps and modern disasters, Imperial Rome and Standard Oil, Ukrainian ravines and a Belfast shipyard—all unfold in poems that are electric in energy and deeply humane in their inquiry.

“Is there any living poet with as skilled … an ear?” McSweeney’s

“Muldoon is a true original.”