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Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets

Paul Muldoon

An essential anthology of beloved classics, hidden treasures and standout contemporary examples of this ever-vital and enthralling verse form.

£16.99
Format
Hardback
ISBN
9780571373444
Date Published
11.09.2025
Delivery
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Summary

In the introduction to his selection of some of the greatest sonnets ever written, Paul Muldoon reminds us that part of the reason for the ‘durability’ of the sonnet is its ‘very specific duration’. It is the perfect length for what Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as ‘a moment’s monument’ or William Wordsworth as a ‘scanty plot of ground’ offering ‘brief solace’ for those who ‘have felt the weight of too much liberty’. Among the poets included in this centuries-spanning edition are Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, John Donne, Terrance Hayes, John Keats, Claude McKay, Edna St Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Patricia Smith and W. B. Yeats. There are also translations by Muldoon of sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke and César Vallejo, as well as the duo of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

PaulMuldoon

Paul Muldoon is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Among his other awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 2003 Griffin Prize, the 2015 Pigott Prize, and the 2017 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in County Armagh in 1951, he has…

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