Tuesday, March 15, 2011

News at Eleven: The most noticeable thing throughout this book

is how incredibly musical [Glyn] Maxwell's work is: these poems come alive when they are read aloud. This is largely a matter of poetic form--Maxwell has no time for so-called free verse--though that term is perhaps misleading. By form, I don't mean the particular arrangements of rhymes within a regular stanza structure (though he sometimes uses those, too). A slavish dependence on form in that sense will often kill a poem. No, it is based in rhythm, and especially in the relative weights of words and stresses within the line, and the productive tensions between grammatical or sentence structure and line length

from The Guardian: One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems by Glyn Maxwell--review

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