Glyn Maxwell, Pluto (Picador)With most of the words one might use to describe Glyn Maxwell's new book of poems already used in the extensive blurb, might I lay claim to 'displacement'. Maxwell's theme here is displacement in the aftermath of an affair and so, he is an ex- in the same way that Pluto is an ex-planet, once a part of the planetary system but now, although ostensibly still the same object, reduced in status to minor.
In 52 pages of poems, only 13 are taken up by single page poems and 9 fill the rest of the book. The gradual move away from the facility of the short poem that stops at or before the end of the page continues here in poems that only stop once they have finished and a few occupy as many as 8 or 9 pages. On the other hand, to be very unfair, the morbidly obsessed can sometimes brood at length on the subject of their distress.
But if we are invited to examine the grief and loss of the finally over relationship, it is entirely within the constraints of a disciplined art. This is not a self-pitying outpouring or application for the reader's sympathy. Maxwell has invariably been a poet of formal measure and literary othodoxies and he doesn't abandon them in the face of more personal subject matter.
In Byelaws, the first poem, we are introduced to a technique for which there might not yet be a precise term. It is a sort of hendiadys, a pairing of words- and often phrases, sometimes almost synonyms but also sometimes opposites,
Never have left me, never come back,
mourn me in mini-skirts, date me in black,
undress as I dress, when I unpack pack
Such constructions recur throughout the poems, in their most advanced form perhaps in The Window, an elegy for a friend,
verse
as separate from other verse as what,
a pane of glass rained-at
from its neighbour-pane of glass rained-at.
which I, for one, thought was very good. The whole poem, not just that.
But the effect is of both the lines turning back on themselves and extending at the same time.
If Glyn and his friend spent time talking about Dylan, as he says here, there is an authentic touch in The Case of After,
I wrote 'Watching Over'
about you and was blissfully aware
I am writing this and it will still be here
now and you wouldn't.
similar to Dylan saying in Sara, 'Staying up for nights in the Chelsea Hotel writing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you.' And so we are convinced it's true.
Outside of the 'end of the affair' poems are one or two that befit the semi-confessional nature of the book, like Birthplace, a hymn to the ordinary as in Welwyn Garden City, which I thought Maxwell had done something similar to before, but not quite. It was in the Forward anthology. It ends with more of Maxwell's Syntactic Hendiadys with horses standing,
by the quiet trees,
beyond which all the yellow rising hills
you think are there are the yellow rising hills
you thought were there.
And if we think we are reminded of Housman, perhaps we are supposed to be.
It is a memorable collection, sophisticated poetry made from uncomplicated words and a prosodic virtuosity and that is never a bad thing.