Pluto

Pluto the non-planet the ex-planet is the dominant celestial influence in Glyn Maxwells new collection: Pluto is a book about change the before-and-after of love the aftermath of loss: change of status and station home and place of tense and pronoun. It also marks a radical departure for one of our most celebrated English poets: his formidable skills as a rhetorician and dramatist are suddenly directed inwardly to produce poems of brutal self-examination raw elegy and strange songs of the kind those bruising encounters often leave us singing to ourselves. In Pluto Maxwell has set out something like a metaphysic of the affair; the result is a lean and concentrated poetry of great emotional power and far and away Glyn Maxwells most directly personal work to date.