About the Author

An established and critically-acclaimed poet, novelist and playwright, Glyn Maxwell has previously won a Somerset Maugham award, received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and had three collections selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He's also been shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward and T S Eliot prizes.

Reviews

"Clearly the work of the major poet of his generation, boldly expanding the canvas and means of his art." --James Wood

This book-length verse narrative by the 43-year-old Maxwell (The Nerve) is one of the best of its kind that this reviewer has read recently by anyone of the poet's generation. A brilliant, beautifully crafted work by a literary master, it features poems that are always formal and attentive to the music of our daily conversation in a way that reminds us of dramatic narratives in Robert Frost's "North of Boston." But Maxwell extends this form of dramatic personae to broader, almost epic proportions. The poem begins in pre-9/11 New York City at a bar tended by a man who speaks in sestinas (beautifully and quite believably so, it must be noted). There, the poet meets a survivor of London's World War II "Black Saturday" bombings, who tells him a story filled with longing, childhood visions, and terror. The narrative flows with forceful, almost cinematic quality, with the poet always alert to the music of the phrase as well as the forces of the narrative as a whole. Above all, there is a supreme reason for Maxwell's formalism in these pages-not merely for the sake of dogma, as is unfortunately the case of many formal poets writing today, but because his formal verse represents Maxwell's own brand of humanism, where refrains and incantations are never just devices or maneuvers but always a vehicle that displays the depth and surprises of human pathos. This book will be read for years and years to come; highly recommended.-Ilya Kaminsky, writer in residence, Phillips Exeter Acad., NH Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

"Clearly the work of the major poet of his generation, boldly expanding the canvas and means of his art." --James Wood