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Crye

Glyn Maxwell (b.1962) was educated at Oxford and Boston Universities, studying poetry and playwriting with Derek Walcott. His three collections of poetry, most recently Rest for the Wicked (Bloodaxe), have won numerous accolades and awards, and he won the prestigious E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997. Glyn Maxwell is regarded as one of the leading ‘New British Poets’, and has given poetry readings in France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Iceland, Ireland, India, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and the USA. He won the Somerset Maugham Travel Prize for Out of the Rain in 1992 and was shortlisted in 1992 and 1995 for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, and in 1995 for the T.S. Eliot Prize. As a playwright his verse drama Gnyss the Magnificent (Chatto & Windus) was published in 1993, while his first professional production The Heart in Hiding was staged last year at the Battersea Arts Centre. His first novel Blue Burneau (Chatto & Windus) was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize in 1994. He writes reviews for the TLS, the Independent and Vogue, and divides his time between London and the USA, where he teaches at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

THE POETRY OF CRYE

The recurring metric of these poems is a strong iambic tetrameter constantly pestered and juddered by a three-beat line that follows, usually for special effects: enter a bloody apparition, exit gentle reason...

And all it ever is for us is
SOMEONE AT THE DOOR

The pivot between these kinds of line is meant to keep raising the pitch, upping the stakes, lowering the odds against something grim happening. They are wellings-up of pain, like the sundry squat diseases the Holbornes, Humes and Laweses suffered while they wrote this stuff. Anyone would be melancholy. That is part of the sound. (Today the same men play electric guitars: their pain is that they think no one can hear them.) Pain, incapacitation: those along with loss and the bewilderment of thought in a torn country.

Rachell is torn. Sits torn in a cottage, and her wound arrives in the form of the Survivor, asking after her, at the door. He’s ages at the door, about half an hour in your time, but most peoms are written in dreading expectation of a visit. Rachell takes four letters to get anywhere near reality. Then she hears the truth once. All the Survivor has brought to mend her heart with are heroic couplets about one unheroic couple. Once again, two Englishmen run a race holding hands, and their woman sits forgotten at the wrong end of the valley.

Fire comes at the end, the weathervane chooses that one, and a very small moment casts a very great shadow for no time at all. What's left are English neighbours, and in each throat a lump. The lump is the silence when an iamb goes missing.

Glyn Maxwell

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