The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust (ICPT) has announced that the Ireland Professor of Poetry, Paul Muldoon, has returned to Ireland to be resident with University College Dublin for the Spring 2025 semester.
Muldoon will host a series of nine discussions on Wednesdays from 3.30pm to 5.30pm, up to April 16th, at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) on Stephen’s Green.
Entitled ‘How to Read a Poem‘, the seminar series asks the public to address certain questions such as ‘How do we make sense of the contemporary poem?.’ A public reading and lectures follow and more information on these can be found by visiting the ICPT website.
Meanwhile, Muldoon’s collaborative artist’s book project with the late American painter Philip Pearlstein, entitled ‘The Castle of Perseverance’, still warrants checking out. Muldoon’s poems are accompanied in the book by a series of lively watercolour reproductions which, as the artist explains, are ‘mostly of terra cotta objects…vessels and fragments of gods, goddesses, and demons from various ancient cultures.’
Published by the renowned Enitharmon Editions in 2022, the same year as Pearlstein’s death, four hundred of the ordinary hardback versions and just fifty copies of the de luxe version were released, of which only about twenty copies of the latter are still available.
Signed by both the artist and the poet, the beautifully printed and bound volume is presented in a dark green solander box with two of Pearlstein’s signed original lithographs included, the first entitled Han Warriors on Horseback in My Studio (36.5 x 28cm) and the second Indonesian Marionettes in My Studio (36.5 x 28cm). The lithographs are printed on 300 gsm Somerset White Velvet at Paupers Press in London.
Full details of this highly-collectible publication can be found at enitharmon.co.uk
Words: Kieran Owens
