Glyn Maxwell’s ambitious and lively novel-in-verse, Time’s Fool, traces the story of young poet Edmund Lea who, after one crucial misdeed, wakes memory-less, eternally condemned to ride a ghost-train through a dark, fen-like netherworld. For Edmund, who remains an eternal seventeen, the lone glimmer of hope resides in the train’s return—every seven years on Christmas Eve—to Edmund’s hometown. Written in deft and casual terza rima, the poem propels itself along any number of rails, of dialectics: authorship and agency, the atemporal space of the train and the world it touches tangentially every seven years, the language of high-lyricism and the dialect of middle England. The main preoccupation, however, is our twinned desire to name and to form: “I would close / that book on nothing”; “I am unspoken. I am a dead language”; “this new town / of black and white, the page.” The lines of the poem are, for Edmund, both mnemonic device and totem against “the deathly white beyond the poem” that is death and the death-in-life of the amnesiac. Maxwell’s tale is mimetic of the train, its aisles full of ghosts: Auden’s breeziness and Larkin’s coy directness are sourced, Coleridge’s Rime invoked (“mind / …as blank as the frozen sea”) as well as Eliot, whose Prufrock is likewise victimized and neglected by time (“lamps in the fog along the frosted lane”; “they come and go / the men, they come and go”). The poem best displays Maxwell’s gifts—and the malleability of metrical form to the homespun colloquial—in the sections devoted to Edmund’s septa-annual Christmas returns. These offer a sharp combination of satire and nostalgia and yank Edmund and the poem out of the quasi-surreal lyricism of the train passages. Though Maxwell’s poem spans nearly fifty years, one gets the sense that the writer is exploring his own unchanging territory: a cloistered, frustrated poet’s longing to surface from his world of memory and text. Condemned to a vertiginous existence of eternal youth and eternal isolation, Edmund poignantly sums up The Poet’s plight in an imaginary conversation with Happy Hour, his ghoulish bartender: “We’re gone / Happy Hour, we’re gone. Why so we are, Edmund, we’re the goingest of men.”
The Boys at Twilight, which collects poems from Maxwell’s first three books, foreshadows many of these same concerns while hinting at the same strengths. In “Out of the Rain,” he is already pitting the desire to remember and cohere through form (“I have to hum that song / to haul it back”) against a washed-out (Biblical) apocalyptic landscape. The poems here are alternately playful and political, veering confidently between public and private spheres. Equally impressive are the early, narrative poems, which frequently undo their own cinematic virtuosity to reveal a heartbreakingly personal touch. In “The Mayor’s Son,” for instance, a black trilby hat that represents a teenager’s foolish audacity—and draws the narrator’s scorn—is transformed by the end of the poem into a shared symbol of lost innocence, offering an unabashed moment of grace in a narrative of erasure and omission. Maxwell proves equally adept at a disquieting, percussive, metrical regularity. In “The Boys in Twilight” he uses a metronomic line and strong rhyme to transform the wistful, lilac-tinged romance of adolescence into the desperate hopefulness of young men at war. Throughout the collection, Maxwell charts the uneasy journey to responsibility and adulthood—the ultimate “authority”—and draws a wavering line through violence, childbirth, and love: “There’s a boy tomorrow and a boy today, / words they are going to remember to say… / They have no idea but they feel them again, / Who are going to be boys, who have had to be men.”