SOURCE: Review of Moy Sand and Gravel, by Paul Muldoon. Publishers Weekly 249 no. 24 (17 June 2002): 57.

In the following review, the critic commends Muldoon's “suburban observation and whimsical memory” in Moy Sand and Gravel.

[Moy Sand and Gravel, t]his first full volume since Muldoon's monumental Poems 1968-1998 reveals one of the English-speaking world's most acclaimed poets still at the top of his slippery, virtuosic game. Born in Northern Ireland, for more than a decade Muldoon has lived, taught and raised a family in Princeton, N.J. Hay (1998) showed Muldoon incorporating his wife's Jewish-American heritage, and his life as a father, into a poetics previously noted for its formal complexity, its shaggy-dog-story narratives, and its interest in Irish history. This substantial collection furthers Hay's subjects. It succeeds with fast-paced poems of suburban observation and whimsical memory in difficult forms: some inherited (terza rima, sestina, tercets, haiku, catechism, Yeats's “Prayer...