Frolic and detour

Although Frolic and Detour is Paul Muldoon's thirteenth book, it has all the passion and provocation we more often associate with a first collection. Ranging as it does from poems that take as their subject matter the Native American leaders Joseph Brant and Mangas Coloradas, through the Great War, the Irish Rising, hunting with eagles, the house wren, all the way to the day-to-day assault of twenty-first-century America, Frolic and Detour reminds us that the sidelong glance is the sweetest, the tangential approach the most telling. It also confirms Dwight Garner's assessment of Selected Poems 1968-2014 in the New York Times : 'a compact, powerful book, filled with catharses you didn't know you needed'.