One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems

The poems of Glyn Maxwell possess a slow, quiet fire. They refrain from grand gestures, from loud proclamations of emotion. Instead, Maxwell unveils these emotions gently, quietly, intricately—like little postcards in a waxed envelope. Each of his poems is Blake’s “world in a grain of sand.” Maxwell's works reveal very little about their subjects; there are, rather, merely the faintest, well-chosen hints of quotidian life: a man kills a wasp; a man falls in and out of love; a man escapes from an unnamed pursuer. But from these suggestive fragments, it is possible to extrapolate an entire world.

The casual virtuosity that first brought Maxwell great renown is on show throughout the poems collected in One Thousand Nights and Counting. Lyrical or narrative, comic or contemplative, these are profound, resonant explorations of love and fatherhood, of triumph and longing. They will not soon be forgotten.