A self-portrait in 154 songs, by our greatest living songwriter.

In this extraordinary book, with unparalleled candour, Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 154 songs from all stages of his career - from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. Arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account, it establishes definitive texts of the songs' lyrics for the first time and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now.

Presented with this is a treasure trove of material from McCartney's personal archive - drafts, letters, photographs - never seen before, which make this also a unique visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. We learn intimately about the man, the creative process, the working out of melodies, the moments of inspiration. The voice and personality of Paul McCartney sings off every page.

There has never been a book about a great musician like it.

From his early Liverpool days, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his long solo career, The Lyrics pairs the definitive texts of 154 songs by Paul McCartney with first-person commentaries on his life and music. Spanning two alphabetically arranged volumes, these commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them: his devoted parents, Mary and Jim; his songwriting partner, John Lennon; his "Golden Earth Girl", Linda Eastman; his wife, Nancy McCartney; and even Queen Elizabeth II, amongst many others. Here are the origins of "Let It Be", "Lovely Rita", "Yesterday", and "Mull of Kintyre", as well as McCartney's literary influences, including Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Alan Durband, his secondary school English teacher. With images from McCartney's personal archives-handwritten texts, paintings and photographs, hundreds previously unseen-The Lyrics, spanning sixty-four years, is the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

An extraordinarily successful collaboration between the Irish poet, Paul Muldoon and the acclaimed Scottish photographer, Norman McBeath, in which there's an uncanny relationship between word and black-and-white image. Although a McBeath photograph (of a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene) is directly invoked in one poem, much of the success of this beautifully produced book has to do with indirection and evocation. It's as if this book presents us with a distinctly new genre - photometry.

New Weather was Paul Muldoon's first book of poems. When it appeared in 1973, Seamus Heaney described its author as 'unusually gifted, endowed with an individual sense of rhythm, a natural and copious vocabulary, a technical accomplishment and an intellectual boldness that mark him as the most promising poet to appear in Ireland for years'. While the promise has been amply fulfilled, this new paperback edition gives Muldoon's many, more recent admirers the opportunity to see what a versatile and substantial artist he was from the outset.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEK The hard-hitting new poetry collection from 'Ireland's most ingenious poet' (Telegraph). 'Very few poets, living or otherwise, can combine high-speed wit, tongue-twisting alliteration and dizzying rhyme with the kind of insight that makes us pause, laugh, remember; feel envious, out of breath, punch-drunk.' Kit Fan, Guardian A 'howdie-skelp' is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an 'affront' to good taste. Paul Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture, but to hold our attention.

In his eleventh full-length collection, Paul Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are 'sex and the dead', Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its 'subject' the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal car accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title-sequence but many of the round-songs that characterize Maggot and has led Angela Leighton, writing in the TLS, to see these new poems (on their earlier appearance in Plan B, an interim volume which included several of the poems in Maggot) as giving readers 'a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish.'

Finally in paperback and featuring seven new song commentaries, the #1 New York Times bestseller celebrates the creative life and unparalleled musical genius of Paul McCartney. Spanning sixty-four years—from his early days in Liverpool, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo career—Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics revolutionized the way artists write about music. An unprecedented “triumph” (Times UK), this handsomely designed volume pairs the definitive texts of over 160 songs with first-person commentaries on McCartney’s life, revealing the diverse circumstances in which songs were written; how they ultimately came to be; and the remarkable, yet often delightfully ordinary, people and places that inspired them. The Lyrics also includes: · A personal foreword by McCartney · An unprecedented range of songs, from beloved standards like “Band on the Run” to new additions “Day Tripper” and “Magical Mystery Tour” · Over 160 images from McCartney’s own archives Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, The Lyrics is the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

Although Frolic and Detour is Paul Muldoon's thirteenth book, it has all the passion and provocation we more often associate with a first collection. Ranging as it does from poems that take as their subject matter the Native American leaders Joseph Brant and Mangas Coloradas, through the Great War, the Irish Rising, hunting with eagles, the house wren, all the way to the day-to-day assault of twenty-first-century America, Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling. It also confirms Dwight Garner's assessment of Selected Poems 1968-2014 in the New York Times: 'a compact, powerful book, filled with catharses you didn't know you needed'.

'The Faber Book of Beasts is a generous and intelligent round- up of old favourites, new juxtapositions, and poems we mightn't know about ... Will set heads shaking, as well as nodding with pleasure.' Independent William Wordsworth's 'To a Skylark' W.B. Yeats' 'Leda and the Swan' Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Moose' D.H. Lawrence's 'Bat' Marianne Moore's 'Elephants' William Blake's 'The Tyger' Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'The Windhover' Thom Gunn's 'The Snail' Seamus Heaney's 'Otter' John Donne's 'The Flea' Christopher Smart's 'My Cat Jeoffry' 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' From childhood rhymes to canonical classics, Homer to Ted Hughes, this eclectic poetry anthology celebrating the earth's creatures brims with beastly delights. Celebrated poet Paul Muldoon's bestiary shows that we are 'most human in the presence of animals', whether tame or wild, common or exotic, mammals or reptiles, real or imaginary - and the result is a must-read for animal-lovers of all ages everywhere. 'Animals bring the best out in us [and make] the best art ... Elephants, skunks, otters, hedgehogs and hippos feature in Muldoon's menagerie; how charming it is to observe how they nuzzle along together in his engaging anthology.' Irish Times

Selected Poems 1968-2014 offers forty-five years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who 'began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso' (Michael Hofmann). Hailed by Seamus Heaney as 'one of the era's true originals', Muldoon seems determined to escape definition yet this volume, chosen by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual high jinx and emotional honesty. Among his many honours are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize 'for contributions from English-speaking Europe to the European inheritance.'

Meeting the British is Paul Muldoon's fifth collection of poems. They range from an account of the first recorded case of germ warfare, through a meditation on a bar of soap, to a sequence of monologues spoken by some of the famous, or infamous, inhabitants of '7, Middagh Street', New York, on Thanksgiving Day, 1940.

Paul Muldoon has been interested in writing for music for at least twenty years, over which time he has collaborated with composers as various as Mark-Anthony Turnage, Warren Zevon, and Wayside Shrines, the Princeton-based musical collective of which he is a founder member. Songs and Sonnets brings together poems and lyrics from a writer who has been described by The Irish Times as 'a force of nature.'

Since his first recordings in 1955, Johnny Cash has been an icon in the music world. In his newly discovered poems and song lyrics, we see the world through his eyes. The poetry reveals his depth of understanding, both of the world around him and within - his frailties and his strengths alike. He pens verses in his hallmark voice, reflecting upon love, pain, freedom, fame and mortality. Illustrated with facsimile reproductions of Cash's own handwritten pages, Forever Words is a remarkable addition to the canon of one of America's heroes. His music is a part of our collective history, and here he demonstrates the depth of his talent as a writer. Edited and introduced by Paul Muldoon, with a foreword by John Carter Cash, this is a book sure to delight and surprise fans the world over.

'More often than I can count, I've been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right. The one thing I've always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I've learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.' In this extraordinary book, with unparalleled candour, Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 161 songs from all stages of his career - from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. Arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account, it establishes definitive texts of the songs' lyrics for the first time and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now. Presented with this is a treasure trove of material from McCartney's personal archive - drafts, letters, photographs - never seen before, which make this also a unique visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. We learn intimately about the man, the creative process, the working out of melodies, the moments of inspiration. The voice and personality of Paul McCartney sings off every page. There has never been a book about a great musician like it.

Why Brownlee Left, a Poetry Book Society Choice and winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, confirmed Paul Muldoon's reputation as the most inventive voice of his generation when it was first published in 1980. The key figure in the poet's third collection is the enigmatic Brownlee; strong-willed and wayward, past shaky, future hazy, present whereabouts uncertain. There are many new departures here, but Why Brownlee Left also explores with increasing authority themes already apparent in New Weather (1973) and Mules (1977). It culminates in a retelling of 'Immram Mael Duin', a strange voyage of self-discovery by the poet's legendary ancestor.

First published in 1984, Paul Muldoon's The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry sought to establish a canon of Irish Poetry since the death of Yeats. Here the reader can explore substantial selections of the poetry of ten of the most consistently impressive of the post-war poets - Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian. The editor, Paul Muldoon, is widely regarded as the leading Irish poet of his generation. In this anthology he brings together fellow poets who have maintained and extended Yeats's legacy.

Of "Plan B," which included several of the poems in "Maggot," Robert McCrum recently said in the London "Observer "that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of "Maggot," it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of "Maggot "is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize "Maggot," and has led Angela Leighton, writing in "The Times Literary Supplement," to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."

This particular pamphlet is beautifully designed, printed on high-stock paper, with a proper spine, and an ultra-cool cover. It features 19 song lyrics - zany, witty, brilliant, sometimes startling - by the master poet, songs played by his band, Rogue Oliphant.

"A Meteor of Intelligent Substance" "Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is" "Liberties sure is needed in these times." In a short time since its launch, Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics, a quarterly, has become essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues and causes of our time. The writers in Liberties offer deep experience from across borders, national identities, political affiliations and artistic achievements. As the introductory essay in the inaugural edition noted, "At this journal we are betting on what used to be called the common reader, who would rather reflect than belong and asks of our intellectual life more than a choice between orthodoxies." Each issue of Liberties features original in-depth essays and compelling new poetry from some of the world's most significant writers, artists, and scholars, as well as introducing new talent, to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today's culture and politics. This spring issue of Liberties includes: Giles Kepel on the Murder of Samuel Paty; Ingrid Rowland's Long Live the Classics!; Vladimir Kara-Murza Surviving Putin's Poisons; Paul Starr on Reckoning with National Failure from Covid; Becca Rothfeld on Today's Sanctimony Literature; Enrique Krauze explores What is Latin America?; William Deresiewicz on Why Great Visual Art Forces Us to Think; Benjamin Moser on Rediscovering Frans Hals; David Nirenberg on What We Can Learn from Earlier Plagues; Agnes Callard's view of Romance without Love, Love without Romance; Mitchell Abidor looks back to "Social Media" in 1895 to Understand a Crowd's "Wisdom"; The Tallis Scholars' Peter Phillips on the Secrets of Josquin; David Thomson on Movies' Poetic Desire; Poetry from Henri Cole, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Paul Muldoon; and, Leon Wieseltier (editor) asks "Where Are the Americans?" and Celeste Marcus (managing editor) writes for a Pluralistic Heart.

Paul Muldoon's new collection opens with a sonnet sequence, 'Horse Latitudes', written as the U.S. embarked on its foray into Iraq. Poems on historical battles where horses played an important part present us with a commentary on the political agenda of America today.

Gathered by the renowned Irish poet, playwright, and essayist William Butler Yeats, the sixty-five tales and poems in this delightful collection uniquely capture the rich heritage of the Celtic imagination. Filled with legends of village ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, priests, and saints, these stories evoke both tender pathos and lighthearted mirth and embody what Yeats describes as “the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life.”

“The impact of these tales doesn’t stop with Yeats, or Joyce, or Oscar Wilde,” writes Paul Muldoon in his Foreword, “for generations of readers in Ireland and throughout the world have found them flourishing like those persistent fairy thorns.”

In "The End of the Poem," Paul Muldoon dazzlingly explores a diverse group of poems, from Yeats's "All Souls' Night" to Stevie Smith's "I Remember" to Fernando Pessoa's "Autopsychography." Muldoon reminds us that the word "poem" comes, via French, from the Latin and Greek: "a thing made or created." He asks: Can a poem ever be a free-standing structure, or must it always interface with the whole of its author's bibliography--and biography? Muldoon explores the boundlessness created by influence, what Robert Frost meant when he insisted that "the way to read a poem in prose or verse is in the light of all the other poems ever written."
Finally, Muldoon returns to the most fruitful, and fraught, aspect of the phrase "the end of the poem": the interpretation that centers on the "aim" or "function" of a poem, and the question of whether or not the end of the poem is the beginning of criticism. Irreverent and deeply learned, "The End of the Poem "is a vigorous approach to looking at poetry anew.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature. George Gordon was born in London in 1788, of Scottish, French and English extraction. He succeeded to a baronetcy in 1798, and as Lord Byron he was soon to become the most famous poet of his age - with the publication of Childe Harold, in 1812 - as well as one of its most notorious characters. His career spanned a momentous period in European history, in which Byron himself was deeply involved. He left England in 1816, and died in Missolonghi, Greece (where he had gone to join the forces struggling for Greek independence) in 1824.

Paul Muldoon's new book, his twelfth collection of poems, is wide-ranging in its subject matter yet is everywhere concerned with watchfulness. Heedful, hard won, head-turning, heartfelt, these poems attempt to bring scrutiny to bear on everything, including scrutiny itself. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing confirms Nick Laird's assessment, in the New York Review of Books, that Paul Muldoon is 'the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, [who] writes poems like no one else.'