Born in Northern Ireland in 1951, Paul Muldoon is currently Howard G.B. Clark Professor at Princeton University, where he chairs the creative writing program. His eye for penetrating the familiar suggests an experience where a passion for exact description grows from the awareness that what is apparent often contains a deeper, stranger story. Like his deft, inventive use of rhyme, his insistence on etymology, reimagining English and Irish words from their forgotten roots, acknowledges the competing versions that underlie our everyday language and assumptions about the world. HAY (1998) is his tenth volume of poetry; poems from the earlier books are gathered in NEW SELECTED POEMS, 1968-1994 (1996). He received his B.A. from Queen's University in Belfast where he studied with Seamus Heaney, and he was a radio and television producer with the BBC in Northern Ireland for thirteen years until moving to the United States in the late 1980s. His prodigious output as an editor, translator, librettist, and poet have earned him many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Irish Times Award for Poetry.