Paul Muldoon, "Meeting the British"

Paul Muldoon (1951–) was born in Portadown, County Armagh, among a Catholic minority in a predominantly Protestant area. His father was a laborer, farm worker, and mushroom grower, and his mother a schoolteacher. He was educated at the primary school where his mother taught, Collegelands, St. Patrick's College, Armagh, and Queen's University, Belfast. He worked as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Company before leaving to write and to live in the United States. He is Howard G. B. Clark Professor of humanities and creative writing at Princeton University, and currently holds the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford University. He was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award in 1991, the T. S. Eliot Award for The Annals of Chile in 1994, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1996, and the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for his New Selected Poems. His poetry collections include New Weather (1973), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), New Selected Poems 1968–1994 (1996), and most recently Kerry Slides (1996).

"Meeting the British".