Paul Muldoon will be reading from The Castle of Perseverance, a book that pairs new sequences of his poems with watercolours by American painter Philip Pearlstein (1924- 2022), revered as one of the modern masters of figurative art, at the British Library in London on Friday 10 February at 7pm. Muldoon’s words are matched to Pearlstein’s images of terracotta objects and fragments of gods, goddesses, and demons from ancient cultures.

In his introduction to the book Muldoon says: ‘When I’d first asked Philip Pearlstein if he might be interested in going in with me on a collaborative project I had no idea that he was already making these pieces [watercolours of assemblages drawn from his many collections of artefacts, bric-à-brac, and other bits and bobs]. I was immediately fired, however, by the gay gallimaufry each exhibits. These are juxtapositions that are at once jolting and just.

"The problem now had to do with how I might 'respond' to the watercolours without being hopelessly literal-minded; one solution seemed to be to try to write a series of poems that would offer their own versions of the concept of the hodgepodge, starting with Howard Carter’s account of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb and crossfading to my childhood home in County Armagh with its parlour that seemed to be decked out less for our day-to-day lives than as an anteroom to some afterworld." More details