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Glyn MaxwellGlyn Maxwell
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BiographyGlyn Maxwell was born in 1962 in Welwyn Garden City, England. He read English at Oxford University and won a scholarship to Boston University where he studied on the poetry and drama courses taught by Derek Walcott. He moved to the USA in 1996, teaching first at Amherst College, Massachusetts, then at Columbia University and The New School in New York City. In 1997 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was appointed Poetry Editor at the New Republic in 2001, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Glyn Maxwell is currently adapting Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose for Moving Pictures Theatre Company. His latest poetry collection, Hide Now, was published in 2008, and shortlisted for the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2009 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).
His latest novel is The Girl Who Was Going to Die (2008).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Drama, Fiction, Libretto, Poetry, Radio drama
BibliographyTale of the Mayor's Son Bloodaxe, 1990 Out of the Rain Bloodaxe, 1992 Gnyss the Magnificent: Three Verse Plays Chatto & Windus, 1993 Blue Burneau Chatto & Windus, 1994 Penguin Modern Poets 3 (Glyn Maxwell, Mick Imlah, Peter Reading) Penguin, 1995 Rest for the Wicked Bloodaxe, 1995 Moon Country (with Simon Armitage) Faber and Faber, 1996 Wolfpit: The Tale of the Green Children of Suffolk Arc, 1996 The World They Mean: A New Poem (drawings by Mary Griffiths) Clarion, 1997 The Breakage Faber and Faber, 1998 The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (contributor) Picador, 1998 The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (contributor) Viking, 1998 Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (contributor) Penguin, 1999 The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (contributor) Harvill, 1999 The Boys at Twilight Bloodaxe, 2000 Time's Fool Picador, 2000 The Nerve Picador, 2002 The Forever Waltz Oberon, 2005 The Sugar Mile Picador, 2005 Plays One (contents: 'The Lifeblood'; 'Wolfpit'; 'the Only Girl in the World') Oberon, 2007 Plays Two (contents: 'Broken Journey'; 'Best Man Speech'; 'The Last Valentine') Oberon, 2007 Hide Now Picador, 2008 The Girl Who Was Going to Die Jonathan Cape, 2008
Prizes and awards1991 Eric Gregory Award 1992 Somerset Maugham Award Out of the Rain 1994 Whitbread First Novel Award (shortlist) Blue Burneau 1995 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Rest for the Wicked 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award (shortlist) Rest for the Wicked 1997 E. M. Forster Award 1998 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) The Breakage 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) The Breakage 2004 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize The Nerve 2008 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Hide Now 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Hide Now
Critical PerspectiveGlyn Maxwell’s book-length dramatic poem, The Sugar Mile (2005), is prefaced by lines from a notebook that suggest images from the ‘9/11’ attacks on the Twin Towers: ‘All land / is a ledge, all space is a drop, all steps have a nerve. // There can be no first person. / I fill my lungs to go and the first person’s / yards ahead. Then he jumps.’ But the setting is actually ‘September 8th, Broadway & 86th’, and it becomes clear that the framing narrative is taking place in a raucous New York bar, in advance of that pivotal event. The work’s other storyline summons up the ghostly voices of wartime London, through elderly barfly Joe, once a paperboy during the Blitz and compelled to tell his tale of suffering and lost love to the poet ‘Glen’. A complex but ultimately moving piece of storytelling, The Sugar Mile’s artful manipulation of the past and present - deploying his poetic formalism within what seems to be demotic speech - is emblematic of Maxwell’s writing thus far, divided as it has been between British and American concerns. Of course, he first really developed by studying with his mentor Derek Walcott at Boston University, and later on made an Auden-like career move back to the United States, teaching at Amherst College (in the steps of another hero, Robert Frost) and currently working in New York City. His recent poetry, notably in The Nerve (2002), has come to increasingly reflect upon Americana, from the execution of the Oklahoma bomber McVeigh (‘Burning Song’) to ‘Refugees in Massachussetts’.
These serious subjects indicate a good deal of development since he first came to prominence, as the most insouciant stylist among the so-called ‘New Generation Poets’ who emerged from the 1994 Poetry Society promotion onwards. Maxwell has proved to be the most versatile, restless and certainly most prolific writer among them. He has already produced a great deal, across several genres, including opera libretti and a film screenplay in progress. His one novel so far, Blue Burneau (1994), is a pastiche political thriller in which a bodyguard goes on the run after the assassination of a Viceroy on the exotic island of Badeo, and (a perennial Maxwell theme) adopts new identities to survive. Time’s Fool (2000) could arguably also be regarded as a novel, albeit consisting of 395 pages of richly imagined narrative verse. It is a rewriting of The Flying Dutchman, set aboard a hellish, time-travelling train journey through English culture from 1970 to 2019. The ageless wanderer, Edmund Lea, haunted by his apparent crime and encountering a host of characters from his past, travels on with the conviction that ‘only the purest / love can help me’. The eventual destination, ‘Hartsmere’, bears some of the hallmarks of Maxwell’s own hometown of Welwyn Garden City, which he has invoked obliquely throughout his works.
His collection, Rest for the Wicked (1995), significantly includes some of the ‘songs’ from the large-scale verse plays that Maxwell was already writing and putting on in the back garden of his family home, as a self-styled ‘Ben Jonson of the Suburbs’. They begin with The Birthday Ball of Zelda Nein (first performed in 1991), a Gothic fairy tale of the Thatcher era, with family and friends taking on parts as aristocrats, spoilt rich girls, social climbers, and menacing bouncers. Zelda’s 21st birthday celebration is disrupted by the arrival of an uncomfortable reminder of the past, the shabby Padgett, who demands she keeps her promise to be his wife. It was followed in 1993 by what is still probably his best-known drama, Gnyss the Magnificent. This again has elements of fairy tale (with a ‘Damsel’ and a wicked stepmother) but is more overtly political, moving between two time frames, in and around the Palace of the New Republic. Gnyss is a Stalin-like dictator who arranged the assassination of his rivals before an election and then had the history of the Revolution re-written. The stage business is well managed, mostly in fluent if somewhat ‘stagey’ pentameters, aided by the songs of the poet Lazarus. We follow the comically inept assassins making their way through the poisonous Given-Up Land during the year ‘62, and the exposure of Gnyss (‘Ageing in the Age of Me’) in the year ’83, by the revelations of a new history book. The leader of the new regime observes of the now pathetic ‘Citizen’ Gnyss , ‘Let him die / Like my father did, with no guarantees’.
Maxwell’s more recent plays have usually been seen at the Edinburgh Festival, and some have been put on in London. The latter include Broken Journey (1999), updating Rashomon with bikers and partygoers, and Anyroad (2000), a comedy about a traveling circus, based upon the Fellini film La Strada. The Lifeblood, about Mary, Queen of Scots, was showcased by the British Council in Edinburgh, and toured the UK. His play, The Forever Waltz, is a version of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, telling of a visit to the Underworld accompanied by a mysterious, guitar-strumming guide. Its themes - terror and ecstasy, retribution and forgiveness - suggest that it may have elements in common with Time’s Fool.
The more overtly emotional poems in The Breakage (1998) do seem to indicate something of a shift in his work, away from sheer stylistic bravura. Some, for example, are about fatherhood, as in ‘Lullaby of the Thames’. The cover photograph shows his grandfather as a young man with four friends, a scene explained in ‘My Grandfather at the Pool’, who is ‘About to live the trenches and survive, / Alone, as luck would have it, of the five’. The First World War is also the background of ‘An August Monday’, and ‘Valentines at the Front', which concludes: ‘the past has burst its sides / And spilled into the future in the ink / Of untold villages of untold brides’. At the heart of the book is a sequence of 14 ‘Letters to Edward Thomas’, written while Maxwell was at Amherst. They reflect not only on England and America, the friendship between Thomas and Robert Frost, but also on his own poetic lineage (‘Frost died, I was born’). Maxwell’s rather arch sense of humour is, however, still at large, in a ‘Homage to the Presiding Spirit of Amherst’ about jogging: ‘I woulda jogged forever if I coulda. / It did me good. I hope it does you gooder’.
As his voluminous works have unfolded, Glyn Maxwell has become ever more ‘genre bending’, mature in handling serious subjects. He is now one of the few figures to straddle contemporary British and American poetry. The choreography of voices in The Sugar Mile suggests as much, and his writing is likely to be ever more mediated by American perspectives. He has aptly observed that ‘every age / In writing is a step along a shelf / Where words are stowed and weathered like a self’ (‘For My Daughter’).
Dr Jules Smith, 2005
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