Ireland’s most ingenious poet

Paul Muldoon glues bric-abrac with baroque rhyme. By Tristram Fane Saunders

FROLIC AND DETOUR by Paul Muldoon 128pp, Faber, £14.99, ebook £9.35

Frolic and Detour is a perfect title: there’s plenty of both in this new collection from Ireland’s most ingenious poet. Paul Muldoon brings centuries of knowledge to anything his eye settles on. How else to deal with “A world that now makes sense/ only in our rear-view mirror”? You may have to brush up on alchemy, Apache chieftains and the Easter Rising.

It’s not all great. One long, silly ballad commissioned by a Belfast hotel reads like it was knocked out over lunch there, and his political barbs – of which there are plenty, apparently with real anger behind them – can sound flimsy and belated (“Why the electorate chooses/ the likes of Ronald Bonzo and George W Bonzo/ as Commander-in-Chief has already defied exegesis”). For the most part, though, Frolic and Detour is a treat. Baroque rhyme glues the bric-a-brac together, making each poem more than the sum of its eclectic parts.

He finds the perfect symbol for his technique in the cloud coughed up by an Icelandic volcano: “Since it’s for the most part/ Composed of vitreous ash, silica,/ Ferrous oak gall,/ resentment, griefs, squabbles and squalls/ It may yet enthrall/ The plane’s state-of-the-art/ Combustion chamber, clogging the engine with molten glass/

The way a poem may yet stop the heart.”

Nobody writes an elegy like Muldoon. In tributes to Leonard Cohen and C K Williams, he finds a way to talk about the unspeakable by talking about everything else. “With Eilmer of Malmesbury” uses the story of an 11th-century monk who tried to fly on home-made wings to address the suicide of a friend’s son. Its closing lines are a reminder that, for all his wit, Muldoon can still be deeply moving. “When I look down I see the pall cast over everything/ is only partly the shadow/ of my own wing.”