SOURCE: Wheeler, Susan. “Irish Weather over New Jersey.” Publishers Weekly 248, no. 19 (7 May 2001): 216.

In the following essay, Wheeler presents an overview of Muldoon's poetry, literary career, and personal history, along with Muldoon's own comments on these subjects.

Volumes of the complete edition of the OED, still in their worn blue dust jackets, spill off a low-slung table in the center of poet Paul Muldoon's office at Princeton University; behind a ring of chairs, the familiar brown spines of the Encyclopaedia Britannica crowd two shelves. Encyclopedias of words and worlds are in his blood, as the “boy from Moy”—the young Muldoon, growing up in the Moy, in County Armagh, Northern Ireland—grew up with only The Junior World Encyclopaedia in his home.

Over the desk are caricatures of Muldoon, from the Guardian and the New York Review of Books; photographs of the poet's wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz...