Paul Muldoon’s <i>New Weather</i> and the “Accidental” Italics

THE "ACCIDENTAL" ITALICSThere are few things Muldoon critics and enthusiasts like to reminisce about more than the accident of the first edition of New Weather.Released by Faber in 1973, when the poet was just twenty-one years old, this debut volume was printed entirely in italics: in error, as it has come to be known.The upright font was restored for the second edition in 1994, and as Muldoon scholarship was gaining traction with two monographs in the 1990s, the circumstances surrounding the fateful first edition were described as 'a bizarre mix-up', 1 a plainer case of 'a printer's error', 2 and a 'misprint[ing]'. 3 The increasing centrality of mistakes and play in Muldoon's work has served to entrench the early 'error' in subsequent criticism.The mock-serious 'rhythms of correction' 4 in 'Errata' from Hay (1998) ('For "Antrim" read "Armagh"/For "mother" read "other"') are the rhythms in which that volume concludes, and have become a Muldoonian signature. 5 The eccentricity and boisterousness of the typography was also, of course, an early signal of difference in a volume that was shepherded into print by Muldoon's former Queen's tutor Seamus Heaney, and had aroused immediate Heaney comparisons for its artful attention to the rural Northern Irish landscape and Ulster Catholic experience.This was the voice of a 'wholly distinctive sensibility', wrote Edna Longley in her review, which made no explicit mention of the type. 6 The career-launching 'misprint' of the first edition of New Weather, then, provides a fitting aperture into Muldoon's poetics,