One Thousand Nights and Counting Selected Poems

Praise for "Hide Now" "This is bravura stuff, the caesuras and enjambments skillfully arranged . . . Maxwell fully deserves to be called into the company of Auden and Frost." --Adam Newey, "The Guardian"Praise for "One Thousand Nights and Counting" "[Maxwell's] often surreal and opaque poems range across moods and subjects. The best moments occur when readers can lose themselves in the very long poems, in particular the inventive re-imagining of the story of Noah's Ark, 'Out of the Rain, ' and the elegiac 'Letters to Edward Thomas, ' in which the speaker waits for a friend who never arrives . . . Maxwell's poetry can be playful and inventive, beautiful and melancholic . . . Maxwell is one of the stars of poetry across the pond and a rising presence here; this book should win him new fans." --"Publisher's Weekly""Maxwell, a young and prolific Englishman, has authored nine volumes of poetry, nine plays (a tenth is in production), a libretto, a travelogue, and two works of fiction. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, and he has been short-listed twice for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Americans will situate his poems at the confluence of two great streams: the formally inventive, dandyish Auden and the rusticated narratives of Frost. Maxwell is a sort of surrealist Aesop. The poems are written in a straightforward vocabulary but are never simple, like fairy tales. Biblical figures appear. The long sequence 'Out of the Rain' seems to recapitulate the Flood . . . 'Letters to Edward Thomas, ' 'Tale of the Mayor's Son, ' 'Stargazing, ' 'Watching Over, ' selections from 'Time's Fool, ' 'Cassandra'--all excellent. Take this, from 'For My Daughter' 'The day you get the gist / Of what this is becoming you'll have missed / The point you were.'" "--"Michael Autrey, "Booklist""The most noticeable thing throughout this book is how incredibly musical Maxwell's work is: these poems come alive when they are read aloud . . . Maxwell has learnt from the likes of Fros