Glyn Maxwell

'The most compelling, original, charismatic and poetic guide to poetry that I can remember. A handbook written from the heart by one of the true modern masters of the craft.' Simon ArmitageA collection of short essays and reflections on poetry from the acclaimed British poet Glyn Maxwell. These essays illustrate Maxwell’s poetic philosophy, that the greatest verse arises from a harmony of mind and body, and that poetic forms originate in human necessities – breath, heartbeat, footstep, posture. He speaks of his inspirations, his models, and takes us inside the strange world of the Creative Writing Class, where four young hopefuls grapple with love, sex, cheap wine and hard work. With examples from canonical poets, this is a beautiful, accessible guide to the most ancient and sublime of the realms of literature.

"This is a book for anyone," Glyn Maxwell declares of On Poetry. A guide to the writing of poetry and a defense of the art, it will be especially prized by writers and readers who wish to understand why and how poetic technique matters. When Maxwell states, "With rhyme what matters is the distance between rhymes" or "the line-break is punctuation," he compresses into simple, memorable phrases a great deal of practical wisdom.In seven chapters whose weird, gnomic titles announce the singularity of the book--"White," "Black," "Form," "Pulse," "Chime," "Space," and "Time"--the poet explores his belief that the greatest verse arises from a harmony of mind and body, and that poetic forms originate in human necessities: breath, heartbeat, footstep, posture. "The sound of form in poetry descended from song, molded by breath, is the sound of that creature yearning to leave a mark. The meter says tick-tock. The rhyme says remember. The whiteness says alone," Maxwell writes. To illustrate his argument, he draws upon personal touchstones such as Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. An experienced teacher, Maxwell also takes us inside the world of the creative writing class, where we learn from the experiences of four aspiring poets."You master form you master time," Maxwell says. In this guide to the most ancient and sublime of the realms of literature, Maxwell shares his mastery with us.

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.

A new version, from award-winning poet Glyn Maxwell, of Robert Louis Stevenson's Gothic masterpiece. A decent man finds himself stalked and confronted by his own evil alter-ego.

Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there but he has a strange feeling there’s a class to teach. And isn’t that 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, the Brontës, the War Poets and many more all on their way to give readings in the humble village hall. In this one-of-a-kind novel, Maxwell takes writing exercises that he’s used in real classes, and explores them with fictional students and major poets.

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

Pluto – the non-planet, the ex-planet – is the dominant celestial influence in Glyn Maxwell’s new collection: Pluto is a book about change, the before-and-after of love, the aftermath of loss: change of status and station, home and place, of tense and pronoun. It also marks a radical departure for one of our most celebrated English poets: his formidable skills as a rhetorician and dramatist are suddenly directed inwardly, to produce poems of brutal self-examination, raw elegy, and strange songs of the kind those bruising encounters often leave us singing to ourselves. In Pluto, Maxwell has set out something like a metaphysic of the affair; the result is a lean and concentrated poetry of great emotional power, and far and away Glyn Maxwell’s most directly personal work to date.

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 The poems of Glyn Maxwell possess a slow, quiet fire. They refrain from grand gestures, from loud proclamations of emotion. Instead, Maxwell unveils these emotions gently, quietly, intricately--like little postcards in a waxed envelope. Each of his poems is Blake's "world in a grain of sand." Maxwell's works reveal very little about their subjects; there are, rather, merely the faintest, well-chosen hints of quotidian life: a man kills a wasp; a man falls in and out of love; a man escapes from an unnamed pursuer. But from these suggestive fragments, it is possible to extrapolate an entire world. The casual virtuosity that first brought Maxwell great renown is on show throughout the poems collected in One Thousand Nights and Counting. Lyrical or narrative, comic or contemplative, these are profound, resonant explorations of love and fatherhood, of triumph and longing. They will not soon be forgotten.

‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ vowed Malvolio at the end of Twelfth Night, but twelve years have passed in Illyria and nothing has been heard of him. Illyria is a ghost town now: all its young people have left for ‘Upriver’, for the legendary land of Moai, a realm of love requited, fortunes made and dreams come true, presided over by a mysterious figure who may or may not be Malvolio. Whoever he is, the Duke Orsino wants him ‘terminated’ and sends a motley crew of fools and assassins upriver to get the job done. But, as the Ferryman warns them:Nothing makes no sense where we’re going, no geography, no history, no language.Minds, meanings, souls and sexes will be transformed in Moai before the lost are found, the evil foiled, and broken hearts made whole.

It’s a perfect day in Camelot. The Table is Round and the Grail is Holy. Knights joust and Ladies show favour. Blood is spilt, love declared, and medieval pundits talk us through the action. What could possibly go wrong? But then a humble water-carrier falls head-over-heels for an arrogant beauty and in his passion stumbles on the Secret of Controlling Time. Now the survival of the world is in his hands, and it will take more than the wisdom of Merlin to save Old England from catastrophe. Chivalry, showbiz and strange-coloured cocktails meet with Very Weird Results in Merlin and the Woods of Time...

Seven angels have fallen through space and time for so long, they have forgotten why. Coming to rest on a desert landscape, they imagine the creation of a legendary garden that once flourished there and its destruction from greed and neglect. Inspired by Paradise Lost, Seven Angels interprets the themes of John Milton’s masterpiece for a modern audience facing up to the urgent challenges of a changing climate and ever-depleting resources.This is the long-awaited first opera from Luke Bedford featuring the libretto of award-winning poet Glyn Maxwell.

Troy is in ruins. Its men are dead. Its women are captives and the victorious Greeks are camped in the ashes preparing to sail home. Four quarrelling women drawn together by grief… Four exhausted soldiers who hate each other’s guts… A King who falls for a girl so mad she can see the audience… A teenage princess dreaming of the Underworld… And a lonely man of conscience trying to get it all down on paper… Award-winning poet and playwright Glyn Maxwell rips up two Greek tragedies and makes a modern play from the fragments. A witty and passionate retelling of Euripides’ Women Of Troy and Hecuba, After Troy exposes the cruelties of war both then and now.

Developed by the award-winning Opera Group, The Lion's Face is a new opera that was created to introduce children to issues surrounding dementia. It is a collaboration between poet Glyn Maxwell and composer Elena Langer, whose first work together, The Girl of Sand, was very successful.

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

Brilliantly shifting between fantasy and reality and the past and the present, acclaimed playwright Glyn Maxwell tackles celebrity and sanity in this world premiere.Snatched from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight, schoolgirl Michelle Latchford was transformed into Hollywood's hottest property: Mimi Luck. Now the reclusive Mimi is barricaded in her rural hideaway as a paparazzo lurks outside, scrutinised by her watchful agent, and haunted by the memory of the boy all the other kids called God.

"April 1793, the French Revolution is four years old and the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre finds threats to national liberty at home and abroad. When Gamelin, an ambitious and idealistic young magistrate, joins a group of old friends for a picnic outside Paris, the ties of love and affection can take the strain. But how strong will they prove when Gamelin is given power over life and death, and the new republic plunges from high idealism to mob rule and state terror? Private jealousies and public fears, old alliances and new ideologies, panic legislation and political correctness all combine in this thrilling adaptation of Anatole France s 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif. The poet Glyn Maxwell (whose Lifeblood was voted best play by the British Theatre Guide in 2005) brings a colloquial verse of great fluidity and immediacy to a story that is both fresh and relevant."

This stirring verse narrative begins when the poet steps into an uptown Manhattan bar a few days before September 11, 2001. Encountering Joe Stone, a fellow Brit and a barstool regular, the narrator becomes the fated scribe of Joe's memories of London's "Black Saturday," the start of the worst of the Blitz during World War II. As the old man's haunting recollections of the prelude to the Blitz collide with a New York bartender's blithe optimism about the glories of America, we begin to discern the shadows and reflections of the past in New York's impending catastrophe. Deftly moving from past to present, using various poetic forms to delineate each character's unique voice, this verse drama explores everyday beauty and innocence on the brink of disaster.

Glyn Maxwell's "Plays One" saw this internationally-renowned poet's historical plays collected together for the first time. In "Plays Two", the settings are highly contemporary, and the plays are young and adventurous. "Best Man Speech" (a monologue) and "The Last Valentine" are published alongside "Broken Journey" ("Time Out" Critics' Choice), described in the "Independent" as "a bit like watching an Alan Bennett monologue being hijacked by Marilyn Manson."

A history, a legend, a rumour - three stories drawn from the shadows of England..."The Lifeblood" depicts the last days of Mary Queen of Scots, as four men weave about her a web of love and hatred; "Wolfpit" brings alive the extraordinary chronicle of the Green children of Suffolk who appeared inexplicably one summer morning; and love comes to Mary Kelly, "The Only Girl in the World", otherwise known as the last victim of Jack the Ripper.