Nerve [Paperback]

Glyn Maxwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 2002

A new collection from one of the leading poets of the younger generation Glyn Maxwell's THE NERVE follows on the heels of his controversial tour-de-force, the verse-novel TIME'S FOOL. In THE NERVE, his most accessible and richly varied volume to date, the reader will discover New England pastoral, political fable and surreal comic set-pieces, and experience it all through the eye and ear of a poet for whom the world seems to offer constant surprise and revelation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Having achieved prominence in the U.K. for his deft arrangements of ordinary (often suburban) experience into elaborate (often Audenesque) stanzas, British poet Maxwell has lived and taught for the last few years in New England. Following 1999's U.S. debut The Breakage, last year saw the U.S. publication of the verse-novel Time's Fool and the selected collection The Boys at Twilight, with the novel garnering national reviews. This new collection applies Maxwell's fluent gifts to his recent years in America, with a particular focus on western and central Massachusetts. The poet moves from "the rough shape/ your life makes in your town," "out into Massachusetts" past "Massachusetts cows," a town fair, "whole biking dynasties" and the football rivalries of the Pioneer Valley. Several short lyrics simply present valley evenings, stone walls, sets of trees; those with more narrative content eulogize friends or present short tales, including one vignette about a child-sex sting. Maxwell often comes up empty on trying to hit payoff notes ("if time could hear/ it would hear silence"), but readers who seek variety in formal choices will be pleased (as in past volumes) by Maxwell's well-managed pentameters, speedy couplets and fluid syllabics: the especially accomplished final poem offers a set of deft off-rhymes, from "message" to "village" to "knowledge."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Englishman Maxwell (The Breakage) divides his time between Amherst, MA, and New York City and also serves as poetry editor for the New Republic. Like Auden, he is a wry social commentator, fascinated by American phenomena like football games, country fairs, TV weather forecasters, and Internet chat rooms. But he also probes "the nerve" underlying this middle-class predictability. Notably, he describes women writing to criminals on death row, an eccentric who stages his own funeral, and "Genie," the speechless California "wild child." These oddities form "the outline of somewhere/ inhospitable/ with other rules." Like Dickinson and Frost, he is able to bring an effortless moral and aesthetic compression to his work; a discussion of poets and poetry ends thus: "When a verse/ has done its work, it tells there'll be one day/ nothing but the verse." Maxwell composes in a unique musical signature with an obvious gift for phrasing, as when a stream riffles like "a lady smoothing out her sleeve." He is a poet who bears watching on both sides of the Atlantic. Highly recommended. Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Picador (October 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330485431
• ISBN-13: 978-0330485432
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,411,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars nothing special, June 24, 2004

By 

[e-mail] "[e-mail]" (Beaumont, tx USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Nerve (Paperback)

This collections starts off with a great line: "The sea comes in like nothing but the sea" and the poem that follows is an ok poem. The problem is that that ok poem is the best poem in the book. And it is a problem when an "ok poem" is the best poem you've got. Now, don't get me wrong, Maxwell can write a good poem. I've heard him read from his next collection, and it is some good work. But the poems in _The Nerve_ are weak and not very spectacular. They are too quiet for lack of a better word. Maxwell can do better than this. Let's just hope he does.