One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems [Hardcover]

'The effects can be spellbinding. The most noticeable thing throughout this book is how incredibly musical Maxwell's work is... The most useful tool in the poet's workbox is, of course, the iambic pentameter line and its variants, which is something that Maxwell has learnt from the likes of Frost, Auden and, at his best, Larkin. It enables the creation of a kind of spoken music, in which sound and sense and stress all harmonise, giving the poet a wide tonal palette with which to work. . . One Thousand Nights and Counting shows that, at his best, Maxwell is a poet of formidable technical gifts who revels in the sheer power of storytelling. This is a poet who knows as well as any how to make a human sound.' --Guardian

'If any one poet deserved the accolade "poet of the age" it is Maxwell; a man able to imbue uncertain times with a deep sense of the past, modern politics with fairytale, social more with myth. This is a celebration of twenty years of Maxwell's poetry and reveal a man of wit of wisdom, but also a man haunted by the worries of everyday existence. Often the present becomes strange and unfamiliar as the sentence twists and turns, breaks and bonds. The syntax is the star and few poets in the last 50 years have used word and structure to such effect, given us such reason to question the world we thought we knew.' --Press Association

The finest poems from an internationally acclaimed writer

This book selects from twenty years of Glyn Maxwell’s poetry, and provides a concise introduction to one of the most imaginatively gifted poets of the age. Maxwell’s is perhaps the most immediately recognizable voice in British poetry: wry, wise, compellingly rhythmic, and everywhere carrying a sense of the dramatic line no other British poet has won for their verse since W. H. Auden. While wholly contemporary in their social and political concerns, these poems are haunted by forgotten histories, traditional fairytale and myth, parallel worlds which mirror or merge with our own. As Joseph Brodsky noted early in his career, the beating heart of this imaginative risk is the syntax itself: in Maxwell’s hands the poetic sentence becomes a fluid, new and protean thing, a means by which the very structure of time, voice and location may be questioned and made strange. Maxwell is a poet essential to understanding our own unstable times, and few other contemporary writers give us such pause before the world we thought we knew. ‘Glyn Maxwell covers a greater distance in a single line than most people do in a poem’ Joseph Brodsky

An established and critically-acclaimed poet and playwright, Glyn Maxwell has won the Somerset Maugham Prize and 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 has also been shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes, and in 2004 received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Nerve.