MUDe
MUDs are Multi-User Dimensions, online worlds created by language alone. In a collection that throws Irish poetry into the electronic age, John Redmond explores the Internet and car culture, MUDs and moods. New forms of post-industrial community enable us to co-exist facelessly across time and distance, connected but solitary in the virtual realities of the motorway and the Internet. In the title poem, the reader becomes game-player in Redmond's fictional MUD, where a traditional Irish landscape blurs with fantasy elements. Redmond creates a new kind of poetry from the online world's fissiparous language, elliptical, self-interrupting, and fizzing with invention.
About the author
John Redmond was born in Dublin in 1967. After completing a D. Phil on the subject of contemporary poetry at Oxford, he taught for two years at Macalester College in Minnesota. Currently he is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. He reviews poetry widely and was associated with the poetry magazine, Thumbscrew. He has published a textbook "How to Write a Poem" (Oxford: Blackwell) and was the editor of "James Liddy: Selected Poems" ("Dublin: Arlen House"). His critical book "Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry" has just been published by Seren.