How the Hell Are You

How the Hell Are You

Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell

A new collection from Glyn Maxwell – one of the great poetic stylists of the era, and one of its leading dramatic voices – is always a cause for celebration. Here, there are squibs and satires, lyrics and songs, poems written to family members and in memory of loved ones, a series of poems written by an artificial intelligence that will thrill and disturb in equal measure, and a chance for the blank page to finally speak for itself. But How The Hell Are You is, in its way, also a quietly political book: Maxwell regards poetry as truth-telling, and these poems – in their intimate, unsparing accounts and clear-eyed reckonings – recoil from the lies and fake news of the age to actually 'tell it like it is'. How The Hell Are You shows a remarkable imagination and mind working at full tilt, and is the most powerful expression of Maxwell's talent to date.
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One Thousand Nights and Counting

One Thousand Nights and Counting

Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell

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...
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Drinks with Dead Poets

Drinks with Dead Poets

Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell

A spirited homage to the departed literary greats—set in an entrancing English village—this novel tells the tale of a profound autumn term with Poe, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, and the Brontës."I am walking along a country lane with no earthly idea why . . ."Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there—is he dead? In a coma? Dreaming?—but he has a strange feeling there's a class to teach. And isn't that the poet Keats wandering down the lane? Why not ask him to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards?Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, Yeats and Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, the Brownings, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, and many more all on their way to give readings in the humble village hall.And everything these famed personalities say—in class, on stage, at the Cross Keys...
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