One Thousand Nights and Counting
Selected Poems
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
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. While wholly contemporary in their social and political concerns, these poems are haunted by forgotten histories, traditional fairytale and myth, parallel worlds which mirror or merge with our own. As Joseph Brodsky noted early in his career, the beating heart of this imaginative risk is the syntax itself: in Maxwell’s hands the poetic sentence becomes a fluid, new and protean thing, a means by which the very structure of time, voice and location may be questioned and made strange. Maxwell is a poet essential to understanding our own unstable times, and few other contemporary writers give us such pause before the world we thought we knew.
‘Glyn Maxwell covers a greater distance in a single line than most people do in a poem’ Joseph Brodsky
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.
