The Annals of Chile

Summary

Ranging from the landscapes of rural Ireland to the grief-soaked streets of New York, this collection is held together by its extraordinary elegy "Incantata," a spiralling meditation on the death of the artist Mary Earl Powers that becomes an argument for art's power against loss. Muldoon's signature obliquity—his pleasure in arcane rhyme schemes, puns, and abrupt tonal shifts—is here at its most commanding and emotionally forceful. It remains one of the defining collections of 1990s poetry in English.