Frolic and Detour

The imaginative 13th book from Muldoon (One Thousand Things Worth Knowing) features plenty of his signature techniques for fans, though few innovations. Celebrated for his dense, imaginative allusions, Muldoon fills his poems with a cast from antiquity to the present. The poems follow a loose temporal conceit, moving toward more explicitly contemporary settings, though an interest in poetic associations and leaps trouble any straightforward sense of time. For instance, in “With Eilmer of Malmesbury,” the 11th-century Benedictine monk is the counterpoint to the death of a friend’s child. Other 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, such as a couplet describing death as “that unthinkable world where a wasp may recognize another wasp’s face/ and an elephant grieve for an elephant down at the watering place.” While not all the poems reach those heights, Muldoon’s longtime readers will be pleased with this latest addition to his oeuvre. (Nov.)