THE MIRROR In memory of my father I He was no longer my father but I was still his son; I would get to grips with that cold paradox, the remote figure in his Sunday best who was buried the next day. A great day for tears, snifters of sherry, whiskey, beef sandwiches, tea. An old mate of his was recounting their day excursion to Youghal in the Thirties, how he was his first partner on the Cork/Skibbereen route in the late Forties. There was a splay of Mass cards on the sitting-room mantelpiece which formed a crescent round a glass vase, his retirement present from C.I.E. II I didn't realize till two days later it was the mirror took his breath away. The monstrous old Victorian mirror with the ornate gilt frame we had found in the three-storey house when we moved in from the country. I was afraid that it would sneak down from the wall and swallow me up in one gulp in the middle of the night. While he was decorating the bedroom he had taken down the mirror without asking for help; soon he turned the colour of terracotta and his heart broke that night. III There was nothing for it but to set about finishing the job, papering over the cracks, painting the high window, stripping the door, like the door of a crypt. When I took hold of the mirror I had a fright. I imagined him breathing through it. I heard him say in a reassuring whisper: I'll give you a hand here. And we lifted the mirror back in position above the fireplace, my father holding it steady while I drove home the two nails. -- Paul Muldoon 08/04/2003: Mr. Paul Muldoon has been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The 51-year-old Northern-born poet won the US award for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel. A former BBC radio and TV producer, he is now the director of the Creative Writing Programme at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he lives. He is also Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, England. Mr. Muldoon was born in Eglish, Co Armagh, and brought up near the Moy in Co Tyrone. His father was a gardener and mushroom farmer, his mother a schoolteacher. He began writing poetry at the age of 12 and Faber and Faber published his first collection of poems while he was still a student at Queen's University, Belfast. For several years he was a radio producer for BBC Northern Ireland. He moved to the United States in 1987 and has held various teaching posts at the universities of Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.He won the 1995 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for The Annals of Chile. In 1999, the poet was elected unopposed to the 300-year-old position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, becoming only the second Irishman to hold the post. The first was fellow Northerner, Mr. Seamus Heaney, a former mentor of Mr Muldoon. --Excerpt, "The Irish Timess" newspaper.