Hide Now [Paperback]

`Maxwell can be touching as well as didactic about human rootlessness'
--Financial Times

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

In Hide Now, Glyn Maxwell shows how the times have begun to warp time itself: in the poet’s vision, the past rears up again with its angry ghosts, the present is racked by its martial and climatic nightmares, and the future has already come and gone. All the stories of the earth seem menaced by just one – to which nations cover their eyes and ears, and from which the grown-ups run and hide. Scheherazade, Robespierre, Dick Cheney and the Reverend Jim Jones all have their place here, though the book’s presiding genius is the lonely figure of Cassandra, cursed with knowing the fate of a world that finds her screamingly funny. Glyn Maxwell has established an international reputation as one of the most intelligent and stylishly original English poets since Auden, and he has never written with greater urgency or power. ‘[Maxwell’s] astonishing technical facility can make syllables, vowels and consonants do absolutely anything. His energetic voice riffs through evasively ordinary speech taking on love, politics, comedy and bizarre narratives in brilliantly elaborate syntax and forms’ Independent

An established and critically-acclaimed poet, novelist and playwright, Glyn Maxwell has previously won a Somerset Maugham award, received the E.M.Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and had three collections selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He’s also been shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes.