One Thousand Nights and Counting
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
This book selects from twenty years of Glyn Maxwell's poetry, and provides a concise introduction to one of the most imaginatively gifted poets of the age.
Maxwell's is perhaps the most immediately recognizable voice in British poetry: wry, wise, compellingly rhythmic, and everywhere carrying a sense of the dramatic line no other British poet has won for their verse since W. H. Auden.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The British poet Maxwell's first U.S. selected presents a conversational style that is a constant throughout, as is the setting of England and New England; otherwise, these often surreal and opaque poems range across moods and subjects. The best moments occur when readers can lose themselves in the very long poems, in particular the inventive re-imagining of the story of Noah's Ark, "Out of the Rain," and the elegiac "Letters to Edward Thomas," in which the speaker waits for a friend who never arrives: " now it's been so long/ We lost your name in the meadow/ At dusk." Maxwell's poetry can be playful and inventive, beautiful and melancholic, but can also be self-aggrandizing (" Frost died, I was born") and even pretentious: "...his empty book fell open as he snored,/ and the pages leafed themselves until they came/ decisively to a page that bore the word/ Poems, bore the English word for poems,/ Poems, and I weakened then and cried./ I didn't even wake him with these moans of bliss." Yet Maxwell is one of stars of poetry across the pond and a rising presence here; this book should win him new fans.
