The Annals of Chile

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, "The Annals of Chile" confirms Paul Muldoon's stature as one of the most talented poets of his generation. The heart of the book is the long poem "Yarrow," in which Muldoon's powers of insight and wordplay and surprising association are on exuberant display: evoking the 1960s, the poet conjures up a boundless historical present peopled at once by Davy Crockett and Tristan Tzara and Wild Bill Hickok, by Maud Gonne and Michael Jackson, all bought swifly and vividly to life by his fantastical imagination. The collection also contains a group of shorter poems, including "The Birth," a delicate lyric which celebrates the arrival of a baby girl; "Incantata," a deeply felt elegy to a former lover; a Muldoon's inspired adaptation of an episode from Ovid's "Metamorphoses."