Frolic and Detour: Poems

Though is Paul Muldoon’s thirteenth collection, it shows all the energy and ambition we might generally associate with a first book. Here, the poet brings his characteristic humor and humanity to the chickadee, the house wren, the deaths of Leonard Cohen and C. K. Williams, the Irish Rising, the Great War, and how “a streak of ragwort / may yet shine / as an off-the-record / remark becomes the party line.” reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling, and shows us why Paul Muldoon was described by Nick Laird, writing in , as “the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, [who] writes poems like no one else.”