The human condition

Muldoon’s latest collection: Maggot is a book that works as a concept from start to finish.

“A concept album is not a bad way of looking at this. It’s complex, in that, I don’t think I sat down in the way bands would sit down, and write their concept albums. I really only began to understand what the concept might be as the individual poems were written. It becomes clear after a while that there are certain connections with certain poems. But I certainly didn’t say, ‘I’m going to sit down now and write a book of poems in which there are going to be a load of maggots’. That came along later on, when it presented itself, rather than I going looking for it.”