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.