Frolic and Detour

Frolic and Detour is a book that is at once engaged and engaging, woven with subtle threads of history and geography that represent not only our profound interconnectedness but the fragility of those very connections. 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, 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 reminds us why, in his review for the New York Times of Selected Poems 1968-2014, Dwight Garner described it as 'a compact, powerful book, filled with catharses you didn't know you needed'.

Paul Muldoon is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Among his other awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 2003 Griffin Prize, the 2015 Pigott Prize, and the 2017 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in County Armagh in 1951, he has lived since 1987 in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. In 2022 he was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry.