Glyn Maxwell’s new collection is that of a maturing poet. Gone are the spiralling syntax and unsettling masculine narratives of the earlier books; instead, here are the formal control and subjective maturity of an older, wiser poet and father.

The first poem, ‘The Sea Comes in Like Nothing but the Sea’, locates us in Maxwell’s world of creative ‘strictures’: ‘…the god / who asked only a breathing life of us’. This ‘breathing life’ echoes Maxwell’s statement ‘Strictures’ (2000) in Strong Words (Bloodaxe, eds Herbert & Hollis). Here, Maxwell argues that “Poetry is decoration of the breath with stirrings of the mind.” This breath motif is taken further, “A good poem is strung upon a version of itself that is mechanical, fixed, monotonous; one that obeys an average heartbeat, clockwork breath, steady blood, measured footfall.” Here I begin losing faith with him. Body fascism aside, does this mean that those of us who live with high blood pressure, tachycardia, asthma and a limp cannot write ‘good poems’? Surely not. When you start laying down ‘strictures’, you need to be wary. Maxwell may have ditched ‘being one of the lads’, but let’s hope he hasn’t ditched his sense of irony as well.

Despite these problems, I admire many of these poems; the nerve of the book. Maxwell has always had that; nerve. Poetic nerve. Personal nerve. But the nerve is also the conduit of thought and sensation; of touch and (hormones to one side) of feeling; and this book is rich in layered thought and feeling. The idea of the nerve is the background; even the backbone. The title poem is shaped visually like a spine; individual stanzas shaped like vertebrae. The poem begins with body shape and self image:

         Somewhere at the side of the rough shape
         Your life makes in your town,
                   You cross a line,
                   Perhaps,

         In a dusty shop you pause in, or a bar
         You never tried, and a smell
                   Will do as well;
                   Then you’re

         Suddenly very far from what you know.

Such ease; such pleasing music, phrasing and line break; it takes you a great distance in a short time. But nerves ‘begin to give’ – our senses are both the root and the route of our illusions. Maxwell is wise enough to know this and advises ‘Treasure the nerve suggesting otherwise.’ This is simple Eastern philosophy (Maya, the illusion of the senses) handled with subtle artifice.

The collection abounds in formal control – quatrains, syllabics, quintains, rhymed couplets, sonnets and other stanzaic arrangements. Maxwell has always demonstrated this innovative approach to form. The tension between innovation and tradition is still, as expected, very strong – one is tempted to say ‘nervous’, which is something positive for poet and reader alike: the poems have ‘edge’. The writer is kept on his toes, pushed into new territories by the constraints of form; the reader’s senses, imagination and intellect are piqued. How?

In ‘One of the Splendours’ Maxwell feels the urge to learn some names:
        
         The bird with the three semitones, the bird
         that seems to be half air, the butterfly
         that seems to be half everything but word –
         we sat and thought, It’s time. It is our home.
                   We won’t though, I know us…

The repetitions work so well, the rhyme inventive (‘butterfly’ and ‘house’ are fused here in what we might call a ‘semantic rhyme’ of ‘butterfly house.’) The taxonomic ideas are complex by implication. The poem concludes in the impossibility of naming, in the face of language’s inability to tie things down; in the flux of nature and imagination: ‘We rest on all we know, / our little bench, and watch the trees around / in turn unsettle, like an hour ago.’

The poem ‘Blindfold’ utilises a similar visual form, near rhyme and repetitions (at the start of lines mostly), which creates an insistence and rocking invocation. These are small innovations, but effective, as in ‘Refugees in