POETRY COLLECTIONS

Shared Homeland, Different Worldview
By Dwight Garner
New York Times, Published: September 16, 2010

The Northern Ireland-born poets Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon published their first books in 1966 and 1971, and ever since, their verse has been compared and contrasted, often in facile ways, as if they were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Left -Seamus Heaney - photo by Jemimah Kuhfeld

HUMAN CHAIN
By Seamus Heaney
85 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.
MAGGOT
By Paul Muldoon
134 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.

Mr. Heaney is, of course, a national institution in Ireland (he now lives in Dublin), the country’s first Nobel Prize-winning poet since William Butler Yeats. Reading Mr. Heaney’s restrained, earthy poems, you can almost smell the bits of straw and dried sheep dung woven into their woolen fabrics. His work has as much compression, cogency and unhurried rural gravitas as that of any poet alive.

Mr. Muldoon,(right,photo by Oliver Morris), after toddling briefly in Mr. Heaney’s footsteps, has emerged as a much wilder cat, an allusive and riddling poet, one whose Irish roots are tucked into the shadows cast by his cerebral lightning.

Mr. Muldoon, who moved to America in 1987, has yet to win a Nobel Prize, but he can console himself that he is young (59, to Mr. Heaney’s 71) and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize (for “Moy Sand and Gravel” from 2002). He is also poetry editor of The New Yorker, where under his tenure the magazine’s poems have grown more polyglot and playful, and less likely to end up on your mother’s refrigerator.

Read Dwight Garner's full piece at NYT.