One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems

The British poet Maxwell's first U.S. selected presents a conversational style that is a constant throughout, as is the setting of England and New England; otherwise, these 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: "%E2%80%A6now it's been so long/ We lost your name in the meadow/ At dusk." Maxwell's poetry can be playful and inventive, beautiful and melancholic, but can also be self-aggrandizing ("%E2%80%A6Frost died, I was born") and even pretentious: "...his empty book fell open as he snored,/ and the pages leafed themselves until they came/ decisively to a page that bore the word/ Poems, bore the English word for poems,/ Poems, and I weakened then and cried./ I didn't even wake him with these moans of bliss." Yet Maxwell is one of stars of poetry across the pond and a rising presence here; this book should win him new fans. (Sept.)