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Book Cover for: Frolic and Detour: Poems, Paul Muldoon

Frolic and Detour: Poems

Paul Muldoon

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 5 reviews on

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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."

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Nov 3rd, 2020
  • Pages: 144
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.90in - 5.00in - 0.50in - 0.35lb
  • EAN: 9780374539108
  • Categories: European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

About the Author

Muldoon, Paul: - 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 more than 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, Howdie-Skelp.

More books by Paul Muldoon

Book Cover for: Joy in Service on Rue Tagore: Poems, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Moy Sand and Gravel, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Selected Poems 1968-2014, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Howdie-Skelp: Poems, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Madoc: A Mystery, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Hay: Poems, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Horse Latitudes: Poems, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Two American Poets: Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, Alan Klein
Book Cover for: The Penitent State: Exposure, Mourning and the Biopolitics of National Healing, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: The Annals of Chile, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Poems 1968-1998, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Maggot, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: The Ancestor, Paul Muldoon
Book Cover for: Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets, Paul Muldoon

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

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