Breaking Into the State: British Poet Glyn Maxwell Visits Houghton

For someone who has been, variously, described as “a poet of immense promise and unforgettable delivery” (Brodsky), and “England’s brightest new poet for a decade” (Peter Forbes in Poetry Review), Glyn Maxwell is curiously unknown in the U.S. I had attributed this to the same sort of infuriating blindness that means none of my British friends have heard of Jorie Graham. Perusing his last book of lyric poems (The Breakage, Mariner Books) before Wednesday’s reading only seemed to confirm, though, that here was the most English of poets; formal, in the perversely lax manner of late Auden: Colloquial and ironic to the point of self-effacement.

I arrived at the Houghton library slightly early; and was pleasantly surprised by the sizeable—if predominantly tweed-jacketed and elderly—audience. The polished and antique feel of the exhibition room seemed an appropriate setting. I settled into my seat, struck by the spring sun, smugly secure in my own Englishness.

So I was surprised again when, after the usual laudatory introductions, Maxwell was introduced as a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts. After the reading, he told me that he first came to the U.S. in 1987 to study at Boston University with Derek Walcott. “If I hadn’t had a failure of nerve, I would never have gone back. My instincts were telling me to stay,” he said. In the end, he spent 10 more years in London before becoming a semi-permanent U.S. resident.

Maxwell seemed initially to be a somewhat nervous reader. He looks like a young King Hal—red-haired and energetic—and my overwhelming impression was of pent-up energy: hands gripped bloodlessly to his text, voice cracking resonantly. He promised a reading in three parts: new, unpublished poems, followed by a few things from the The Breakage, and then two sections from his recently published long poem, “Time’s Fool.” Like all the readings organised by the Woodberry Poetry Room, his performance was recorded, and will join the set of recordings, beginning with Tennyson, which are stored in the Lamont library. The sonorous Oxford intonations and deft formal turns of first lyrics he read seemed to place him very nicely in this grand tradition. The slightly diffident, and much more down-to-earth, manner with which he introduced his work—“yeah, well, so that was the pitch to Hollywood”—felt, initially, rather at odds with the poems themselves.

But Maxwell is nothing if not chameleon-like. He loosened up as the reading progressed and began to voice a range of different tones and accents in his work. For me, this was exemplified best in his reading of “My Grandfather At The Pool,” a poem written, as he explained, from a photograph of his grandfather:

Five pals in Liverpool about to swim,

The only one who looks away is him.

This photo provides the front cover of The Breakage; it also offers Maxwell an opportunity to reflect, in a typically local and modest way, on the First World War itself. He recalled, as he introduced the poem, a day in his own childhood when his family had taken his grandfather back to the battlefields of Northern France, “he had never spoken about his experiences there to anyone before, and after talking all day about it, he never did again.”

About to line the trenches and survive,

Alone, as luck would have it, of the five.

This poem, like much of Maxwell’s work, works out of a specific location in his own childhood. He read it polyphonically, letting the dry and witty formal turns rub against a more casual, Londoner-in-a-pub style of delivery—a pleasure in the poem as story. Before this reading, my acquaintance with Maxwell’s work was limited to his earliest poems, some of which, as he has himself admitted, are formally tight to the point of obliquity, and a sort of surreal terseness.

The long poem with which he ended allowed a very different Maxwell to emerge—more ruminative, speculative and, I’m tempted to say, more American. The frustrated script writer? Based on the story of the Flying Dutchman, “Time’s Fool” is written in a loose terza rima: still carefully turned, but driven by narrative rather than the internal demands of metre. It seemed entirely appropriate after the reading when, over a glass of pallid Chardonnay, he told me that “strangely, I found it easier to publish this poem in America...it won’t be coming out in Britain until September.”