In our age of facile Instagram poets and one-note-joke performance poetry, Muldoon shows how craft and craftiness can cleave together ... Like many of his previous collections, Frolic And Detour has longer poems interspersed with shorter works. The longer form seems to suit Muldoon best, as a kind of challenge to the idea that the ideal poem is a haiku. It would be wrong to highlight the 'stand out' poems as almost every page shows a dazzle and glamour that few other contemporary poets might reach ... he requires you to re-read, not read ... This is poetry at its most wide-ranging and curious about the world, but cleverly fettered in formal strictures and structures. If you buy one book of poetry this year, make it this one. Although you might learn to appreciate the nuance of how contemporary poetry can be askance and awry, you shall come away with a kind of moral polish. It is not 'difficult'; that curse word of modern poetry. Take for example just this: 'Now we’re known less for snipers’ nests / than nests of singing birds'.

Like Bob Dylan, [Muldoon] makes a point of never being exactly where we expect him to be while somehow remaining distinctively himself. 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 ... Poets as formally dexterous as Muldoon run the risk of being accused of emotional dryness or chilly indifference to the urgent sociopolitical concerns of the hour, and both charges have at times been floated in his direction. Neither applies ... Nothing is more Muldoonian than ending a book with a long poem—every collection since Why Brownlee Left in 1983 has ended so—and it is hard to imagine a more Muldoonian long poem than 'Frolic and Detour.' ... The volume is Muldoonian, too, in including several elegies: C. K. Williams, Richard Wilbur, Leonard Cohen, John Ashbery. The examples of Cohen and Ashbery seem peculiarly apposite as Muldoon wheels into what may be his 'late' phase. 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.

Muldoon reinvigorates the craft in his new, punching collection. Traversing both time and topography, these poems frisk through contrasting sensations ... With a tour guide’s knowledge and engagement, Muldoon circumnavigates historical follies and whims ... This is a strong, agile collection from one of the world’s finest poets at his best.

Muldoon’s the Busby Berkeley of contemporary poetry, his choruses opening and closing like elaborately staged flowers, floating kaleidoscopes of a (sometimes too) clinical precision. A poem in one book will rhyme with a poem in another book published a decade later. The rhymes themselves often out-Byron Byron ... Muldoon’s poems are propelled by association—sonic, metaphorical, historical, coincidental, sometimes private, but usually purposeful ... It’s all so, as the young folk say, extra. But that’s Muldoon in nuce, saints be praised ... I should note that I know Paul a bit, which mustn’t prevent my remarking that at times in Frolic and Detour the poet is merely noodling ... The fireworks and abstrusity get all the press; they’d be but fustian and frills without Muldoon’s animating vision. Over and over he wins you over ...Several of the poems wax indignant about Trump...but with liberal fire I find flickers only faintly...It’s the simpler pleasures that stick with me—the sonic frolic of 'steam-bent wild fig felloes fixed with willow pegs,' the sense reached after a winding detour...

The imaginative 13th book from Muldoon...features plenty of his signature techniques for fans, though few innovations ... 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 ... While not all the poems reach those heights, Muldoon’s longtime readers will be pleased with this latest addition to his oeuvre.