Dazzling with language at Spring Poetry Festival

Northern poet, Paul Muldoon, tells Richard Fitzpatrick about the power of words

THE Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon tops the bill at next week’s Cork Spring Poetry Festival. For what it’s worth — to borrow one of the hackneyed phrases he often likes to playfully start a poem with — he does a good job at selling the intoxicating effect poetry can have on a body.

“There’s a very powerful chemical force at work in the great poem,” he says. “I’ve never got over the impact of John Donne, whom I was lucky enough to first read as a teenager. The magic has to do with the unexpected connections a great poem can allow us to make — as if we were making those connections for ourselves.