Hide Now
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
In Hide Now, Glyn Maxwell shows how the times have begun to warp time itself: in the poet’s vision, the past rears up again with its angry ghosts, the present is racked by its martial and climatic nightmares, and the future has already come and gone. All the stories of the earth seem menaced by just one – to which nations cover their eyes and ears, and from which the grown-ups run and hide. Scheherazade, Robespierre, Dick Cheney and the Reverend Jim Jones all have their place here, though the book’s presiding genius is the lonely figure of Cassandra, cursed with knowing the fate of a world that finds her screamingly funny. Glyn Maxwell has established an international reputation as one of the most intelligent and stylishly original English poets since Auden, and he has never written with greater urgency or power.
‘[Maxwell’s] astonishing technical facility can make syllables, vowels and consonants do absolutely anything. His energetic voice riffs through evasively ordinary speech taking on love, politics, comedy and bizarre narratives in brilliantly elaborate syntax and forms’
Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wit, versatility and gloom are the watchwords in this ninth collection from the celebrated Englishman Maxwell. He worries about his own demise ("Do me my elegy now"), about the inefficacies and uncertainties in his own poetic language ("Dream I had had depended/ on puns"), about old age (in "Lit Windows," a fine if covert homage to Philip Larkin) and about ecological disaster. Maxwell's greatest concern, however, in the wake of 9/11, is about the fate of the world's great cities and of its all too bellicose nation-states. Maxwell holds the volume together with several poems on modern incarnations of the cursed ancient prophet Cassandra, whose predictions were always dismissed. He concludes with three such poems in a row, among them "Blues for Cassie," a haunting bit of cultural cross-pollination in which the fall of Troy becomes the fall of the Twin Towers: "Woke up as lonesome as the single/ snapshot at Grand Central / of thousands on a wall/ one endless fall." Maxwell's skill with the spoken language is on display again, as he stitches casual phrase work into bolts of meter and swaths of rhyme. Supporters will no doubt again liken him to Auden; detractors may once again find him a bit glib.
