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’.