The poems in this volume were selected by Glyn Maxwell from TALE OF THE MAYOR'S SON (published in 1990, when he was twenty-eight), OUT OF THE RAIN (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize), and REST FOR THE WICKED. Maxwell "is a formalist," wrote Robert McIlwaine about his first book, "but . . . he is an outspoken anti-elitist social poet. His strenuous well-wrought poems . . . come from an English tradition of technical virtuosity with plain speech." The Boys at Twilight shows, sometimes comi...

Includes the plays Broken Journey, Best Man Speech and The Last ValentineA car breaks down in a quiet place in the small hours. Soon a man is dead, a woman traumatised, another man accused. But who really knows what happened? Even the dead man tells a tale. Broken Journey examines the terror and beauty hidden in the mist.The truth hurts for bridegroom Addy, when his downtrodden friend takes revenge on him in his Best Man Speec...

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott's celebrated, inimitable, essential career"He gives us more than himself or ‘a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language." Alongside Joseph Brodsky's words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature.The Poetry of Derek Walcot...

A new collection from Glyn Maxwell – one of the great poetic stylists of the era, and one of its leading dramatic voices – is always a cause for celebration.Here, there are squibs and satires, lyrics and songs, poems written to family members and in memory of loved ones, a series of poems written by an artificial intelligence that will thrill and disturb in equal measure, and a chance for the blank page to finally speak for itself. But How The Hell Are You is, in its way, ...

A topical and accessible collection, The Sugar Mile takes its readers on a journey from wartime London to modern-day America. In a series of monologues, each beautifully drawn and intimate, Glyn Maxwell details the effects and experiences of conflict: the sense of community bounded by a distrust of strangers and foreigners; whole streets razed to the ground; homes lost, possessions misplaced and characters displaced; fears for loved-ones offset by tentative bargains with god; casu...

April 1793, the French Revolution is four years old and the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre finds threats to national liberty at home and abroad.When Gamelin, an ambitious and idealistic young magistrate, joins a group of old friends for a picnic outside Paris, the ties of love and affection can take the strain. But how strong will they prove when Gamelin is given power over life and death, and the new republic plunges from high idealism to mob rule and state terror?

Three beautifully crafted plays for young people by the award-winning playwright Glyn Maxwell. Contains the plays Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, and Merlin and the Woods of Time.

Swordsman, Philosopher, Poet, Raconteur Cyrano de Bergerac is all these things, but none of them makes him happy. What he desires above all is the love of the beautiful Roxane. But his problem is as plain as the nose on his face. Surely he is too ugly ever to be loved? Salvation of a kind arrives in the form of the handsome yet tongue-tied Christian de Neuvillette might not Cyrano's eloquence and Christian s beauty together win Roxane? Yet duelling foes, powerful rivals, and a war against ...

Pluto – the non-planet, the ex-planet – is the dominant celestial influence in Glyn Maxwell’s new collection: Pluto is a book about change, the before-and-after of love, the aftermath of loss: change of status and station, home and place, of tense and pronoun. It also marks a radical departure for one of our most celebrated English poets: his formidable skills as a rhetorician and dramatist are suddenly directed inwardly, to produce poems of brutal self-examination, raw elegy, and...

The Summer 2016 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.This 45th anniversary issue, guest edited by novelist Claire Messud and literary critic James Wood, includes new work from Viet Thanh Nguyen (winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize), Lydia Davis, Carys Davies, an...

A new version, from award-winning poet Glyn Maxwell, of Robert Louis Stevenson's Gothic masterpiece. A decent man finds himself stalked and confronted by his own evil alter-ego.

Britain is reeling from reports of a terrorist bomb on a film set that has killed a hundred people and, possibly, the brightest star in Hollywood, Thomas Bayne. Caught up in the middle of the national mourning is Susan Mantle - a rather hopeless London tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit, appearing on the rolling news with the headline 'beautiful but crying'.She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just...