Glyn Maxwell- How the Hell Are You

 Glyn Maxwell, How the Hell Are You ( Picador)

It seems a long time since Pluto, Glyn Maxwell's last book of poems. It was 2013. That's fine. I think there are other things he does and one would rather have a good book not very often than less good books more regularly. Seven years isn't too long, anyway. And it is worth the wait.

A good cover illustration always helps and even more publishers should use them than do. Their relevance becomes clearer after reading the poems, one hopes. The photograph here of a scarecrow in some sort of uniform shirt and gas mask with its alert but not too-aggressive dog alludes as much to the empty hinterland behind it as to the representation of human form that lives in it.

And then we begin with The Strain, which is Glyn's plague poem. The virus is compared with time for its inevitable destructive quality. Time first takes away the idea of being 'young forever' but the plague does,

                          everything

time could do but better.

 

But with an optimism yet to be justified by developments since the book went to press, time will see off even the virus, which it surely will but at what cost we don't yet know.

The limits of Artificial Intelligence are grimly examined in some poems in a book that groups sets of poems together mercifully without making 'sequences' of them. The 'blank page' poems seem to associate either 'writer's block' or the writer's fear of the blank page that one might compare with the goalkeeper's fear of the penalty with an endlessly deferred enquiry elsewhere into thought, language, political rhetoric that suspects at least duplicity, shiftiness or that there's nothing underneath it at all. 

The Other Side might not specifically be a Remainer's lament but that might be where it came from if not the ultimately exhausting process of dismantling what, if anything, politicians have said. There is a maiden aunt in me that wishes poetry could be achieved without some particuular four-letter vernacular words but, yes, that is what it is. And 'what it is', what anything is, if it's anything, might be Glyn Maxwell's theme in much of this book such as the last lines of the title poem in which 'just you and me', are

stopping here for tea

two creatures with no history

who dreamed it would be otherwise but

who the hell are we.

There is also a vacuum at the bottom of Biography, in which writing folds in on itself, replacing life by becoming its purpose,

                he had a brilliant spring

and wrote all summer of the brilliant spring

        he had that year. 

 

Several poems have the feel of sestinas in the way that phrases recur or are modulated as they develop, giving them a sort of organic impetus that dares the reviewer to say anything quite so unnecessary about them until The Heyday tempts one to make a comparison with Donne which I might have been able to do even without having been reading the metaphysical maestro recently.

It's a hugely enjoyable book that makes light of its dark side through ingenuity and that thing that 'poetry' might be said to be - doing more with the language than is usually expected of it.