One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (8 page)

given how they grub

about in the shit. According to Sir Winston, such is the integrity of their limestone coral

the white-clawed crayfish love nothing better than to scrub

some data. No better place to start than with the Mescalero girl who refers to moral

turpitude as moral
turpentine
.

In your chest safe is the very handkerchief a nonplussed

Father Daly waved as a flag of truce on Bloody Sunday. When Pilate lets that hanky fall

it swerves as a morning to those who continue to wine and dine

on Massic and edible dormice, not to speak of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,

for whom this is indeed a wickiup call.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments are due to the editors of:
The American Reader
,
Arts Tonight
(RTÉ),
Catamaran Literary Reader
,
The Guardian
,
Little Star
,
The Mimic Octopus
,
The Paris Review
,
The Penny Dreadful
,
Plume
,
PN Review
,
Poetry & Audience
,
Poetry Daily
,
Poetry London
,
The Poetry Review
,
Princeton Magazine
,
Radio Silence
,
TLS
, and
The Walrus.

Several of these poems appeared in
Songs and Sonnets
, an interim collection published by Enitharmon Press in 2012. A version of “Cuthbert and the Otters” was commissioned by, and read at, the 2013 Durham Book Festival. “Pelt” was printed in a limited edition to celebrate the 2013 Folger Poetry Board Reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library. “Charles Émile Jacque:
Poultry Among Trees
” appeared in
Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on
Art
, edited by Janet McLean and published by Thames & Hudson in 2014. “Pip and Magwitch” appeared in
A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens
, edited by Peter Robinson and published by Two Rivers Press in 2012. “Rita Duffy:
Watchtower II
” appeared in
Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics
, edited by Andrew Ridker and published by Black Ocean in 2014. “Saffron” appeared in
Body of Work: Forty Years of Creative
Writing at UEA
, edited by Giles Foden and published by Full Circle in 2011. “A Civil War Suite” appeared in
Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration
, published by the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian) in 2013. “We Love the Horse Because Its Haunch” was delivered as the 2013 Phi Beta Kappa poem at Princeton University. “Anonymous: From ‘Marban and Guaire'” appeared in
The Finest Musi
c
: Early Irish Lyrics
, edited by Maurice Riordan and published by Faber and Faber Limited in 2014. “Federico García Lorca: ‘Death'” was written for the New York Public Library's 2013 celebration of Federico García Lorca's
Poet in New York
. “A Giraffe” was published in a limited edition by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom in 2012. “Dromedaries and Dung Beetles” appeared in
1914: Poetry Remembers
, edited by Carol Ann Duffy and published by Faber and Faber Limited in 2013. “The Firing Squad” was published in a limited edition by the University of Connecticut in 2014, while “Álvaro de Campos: ‘Belfast, 1922'” was published as a broadside by Emory University that same year. “Camille Pissarro:
Apple Picking at Eragny-sur-Epte
” was commissioned in 2013 by the Dallas Museum of Art.

ALSO BY PAUL MULDOON

New Weather
(1973)

Mules
(1977)

Why Brownlee Left
(1980)

Quoof
(1983)

Meeting the British
(1987)

Selected Poems 1968
–
1986
(1987)

Madoc: A Mystery
(1990)

The Annals of Chile
(1994)

Hay
(1998)

Poems 1968
–
1998
(2001)

Moy Sand and Gravel
(2002)

Horse Latitudes
(2006)

The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures
(2006)

Maggot
(2010)

The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics
(2013)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Copyright © 2015 by Paul Muldoon

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First edition, 2015

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eISBN 9780374713645

First eBook edition: November 2014