Frolic and Detour

by Paul Muldoon

Overview

A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

Though Frolic and Detour 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.” Frolic and Detour 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 The New York Review of Books, as “the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, [who] writes poems like no one else.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374721435
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty years. He is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, and Selected Poems 1968–2014.
Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for thirty years. He is the author of more than a dozen previous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Selected Poems 1968–2014; and, recently, Howdie-Skelp.

Table of Contents

The Great Horse of the World
Encheiresin Naturae
Memphis
Pablo Picasso: Bottle of Bass and Glass (1914)
Georges Braque: Still Life with Bottle of Bass (1914)
The Leader
In the Field with Mangas Coloradas
Corncrake and Curlew
Belfast Hymn
Walnuts
The Ambulance
1916: The Eoghan Rua Variations
Avalon
July 1, 1916: With the Ulster Division
Wilfred Owen: November 4, 1918
Armistice Day
Edward Elgar: Cello Concerto in E Minor (1919)
At Tuam
Likely to Go Unnoticed
Robert Lowell at Castletown House
April in New Hope
A Chickadee in Riverside Park
The Door
With Eilmer of Malmesbury
Plume
Hunting with Eagles, Western Mongolia, 2016
A Tortoise Aubade
Wave
Superior Aloeswood
At the River
It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This
Position Paper
A Rooster in Tepoztlán
Sodus
With Joseph Brant in Canajoharie
Putsch
Frolic and Detour

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

10/01/2019

Mostly formal verse, the poems in Pulitzer Prize winner Muldoon's latest collection offer variations of the sonnet, sestina, and villanelle as they revel in playful homophones, technical virtuosity, and twisted clichés. "A Rooster in Tepoztlán," one of the final poems, illustrates Muldoon's technique and is also one of the best. According to Muldoon, it was inspired by his experience teaching at Under the Volcano, a writing program in the Mexican town of Tepoztlán, known as the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl. Set in early morning just before Lauds, the poem shows "the street-dog choristers" losing out to a single rooster. The poem, written in seven parts and including four tercets per section, is packed with details as Muldoon notes the din of life outside his window. He also muses, as in other poems here, on the present chaotic state of the world as well as his own Irish past. VERDICT As one might expect, these poems are replete with numerous allusions to Catholicism—none of which captures or even suggests its spiritual roots. Instead, they progress collagelike through a dizzying and sometimes witty display of free association, rhyme, half-rhyme, puns, and allusions. For academic libraries only.—C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore

Library Journal

09/16/2019

The imaginative 13th book from Muldoon (One Thousand Things Worth Knowing) features plenty of his signature techniques for fans, though few innovations. Celebrated for his dense, imaginative allusions, Muldoon fills his poems with a cast from antiquity to the present. The poems follow a loose temporal conceit, moving toward more explicitly contemporary settings, though an interest in poetic associations and leaps trouble any straightforward sense of time. For instance, in “With Eilmer of Malmesbury,” the 11th-century Benedictine monk is the counterpoint to the death of a friend’s child. Other poems on mortality, including a number of dedication poems for artists still living or who have recently died—John Ashbery, Leonard Cohen, and Bruce Springsteen among them—provoke some of the book’s most breathtaking writing, such as a couplet describing death as “that unthinkable world where a wasp may recognize another wasp’s face/ and an elephant grieve for an elephant down at the watering place.” While not all the poems reach those heights, Muldoon’s longtime readers will be pleased with this latest addition to his oeuvre. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2019

"Celebrated for his dense, imaginative allusions, Muldoon fills his poems with a cast from antiquity to the present." —Publishers Weekly

"One of the world’s finest poets at his best." —Raul Nino, Booklist

"Muldoon’s extraordinary facility with both familiar and rare closed forms and his acrobatically inventive rhyming and off-rhyming have diminished not a whit in his sixties . . . Like Ashbery in his final collections, or Cohen in his final albums, Muldoon has nothing left to prove, and can take delight simply in doing what he inimitably does. And his delight is ours." —Paul Scott Stanfield, Ploughshares

"Muldoon’s 13th collection applies his characteristically nimble rhymes and musical faculty for language to matters of art (Picasso, Braque), history (the Easter Rising, World War I) and mortality." —Jyoti Thottam, The New York Times Book Review

"[Muldoon] has Donne’s baroque intellectual conceits, but also Byron’s ebullience in word-play… If you buy one book of poetry this year, make it this one. —Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

"For all his wit, Muldoon can still be deeply moving." —Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph

From the Publisher