Scanty Plot of Ground

An essential anthology of beloved classics, hidden treasures and standout contemporary examples of this ever-vital and enthralling verse form. In the introduction to his selection of some of the greatest sonnets ever written, Paul Muldoon reminds us that part of the reason for the "durability" of the sonnet is its "very specific duration." It is the perfect length for what Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as "a moment's monument" or William Wordsworth as a "scanty plot of ground" offering "brief solace" for those who "have felt the weight of too much liberty."

Among the poets included in this centuries-spanning edition are Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, John Donne, Terrance Hayes, John Keats, Claude McKay, Edna St Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Patricia Smith and W. B. Yeats. There are also translations by Muldoon of sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke and César Vallejo, as well as the duo of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

Paul Muldoon has won many awards for his poetry including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in County Armagh in 1951, he has lived since 1987 in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.