Paul Muldoon

I went to a reading by Irish poet Paul Muldoon today in Salt Lake City. He is a fantastically funny man, in a very quiet, clever way, and he has very curly gray hair that was almost a joy to look at in itself. I traveled with my mother and a teacher/poet from the University.

I enjoyed his first few poems the best; they were about growing up in Ireland, and created vivid scenes and inspired deep emotional connections with lovely phrases and stunning images. One poem started by talking about visiting a new traffic circle, the first in the area, as a day's excursion, but then ended with the story of a boy who got his bicycle trashed and had a gun held against his head by Unionists who forced him to curse out the Pope.

His later poems relied, I felt, more heavily on word play (the rhyming in some of his poems was particularly thick), although I will admit that, for the most part, his poems were lyrical and clever. He has a way of connecting something simple, like a turkey buzzard feasting on roadkill, with something personal, like his sister slowly dying, and making it sound beautiful and touching rather than as odd as I just made it sound.

Afterwards, there was going to be a reception, but we didn't stay because it was already eight o'clock and we still had the hour-and-a-half drive up.

As a side note, we stopped at a small restaurant called Salt Lake Pasta and Pizza, where they got us our sandwiches, soup, and salad in less than five minutes when we told them we were in a hurry to catch the show. I've never seen a place be so Johnny-on-the-spot, which was particularly nice since they said they were so busy. They definitely catered to our demands, and although my soda was flat, my sandwich was quite good and my fries were great.