The Sugar Mile

by Glyn Maxwell

Overview

This stirring verse narrative begins when the poet steps into an uptown Manhattan bar a few days before September 11, 2001. Encountering Joe Stone, a fellow Brit and a barstool regular, the narrator becomes the fated scribe of Joe's memories of London's "Black Saturday," the start of the worst of the Blitz during World War II. As the old man's haunting recollections of the prelude to the Blitz collide with a New York bartender's blithe optimism about the glories of America, we begin to discern the shadows and reflections of the past in New York's impending catastrophe. Deftly moving from past to present, using various poetic forms to delineate each character's unique voice, this verse drama explores everyday beauty and innocence on the brink of disaster.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618773657
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/14/2006
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

Glyn Maxwell is the author of several books of poetry, including The Sugar Mile. He is also a dramatist whose plays have been staged in New York, Edinburgh, and London. Among other honors, he has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the E. M. Forster Prize. He was the poetry editor of the New Republic from 2001 to 2007.

Editorial Reviews

"His formal technique is as strong as ever. . .and he still excels as a ventriloquist." Publishers Weekly

"A book of such effortlessly delicate storytelling that one hardly notices how ambitious a project it actually is." —Jon Mooallem The San Francisco Chronicle

"Gripping . . . triumphant . . . a brilliant and deeply enjoyable book." —Robert Travers The Chicago Tribune —

From the Publisher

After the lyric break of The Nerve (2002), Maxwell follows one ambitious if not altogether convincing book-length verse narrative (Time's Fool; 2000) with another, this time letting the story unfold through short poems. In September 2001, at an Irish pub in Manhattan, the poet meets a friendly bartender, Raul, and a sleepy old former Londoner, Joey, who delivered newspapers during the blitz. Most of the poems that follow are framed as Joey's recollections, and most use the voices of Londoners--children and adults, a grandmother, an air-raid warden--during September 1941. Joey gradually reveals the secrets that explain why he left London; Raul is given space to describe the life of the pub and hint that he will die in the Twin Towers attacks. Maxwell, who has been celebrated overseas for a decade as a witty English everyman, has been resident in the U.S. since the late '90s and serves as the New Republic's poetry editor. His formal technique is as strong as ever (especially in three fluent sestinas), and he still excels as a ventriloquist ("Will you still bring/ a paper to/ the ruins Joe?"), but the character development is thin. Maxwell implies, but never quite delivers, intellectual or psychological links between wartime London and post-9/11 New York; what's left--the melancholy of displaced Englishmen--doesn't quite let his new volume go the distance. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This book-length verse narrative by the 43-year-old Maxwell (The Nerve) is one of the best of its kind that this reviewer has read recently by anyone of the poet's generation. A brilliant, beautifully crafted work by a literary master, it features poems that are always formal and attentive to the music of our daily conversation in a way that reminds us of dramatic narratives in Robert Frost's "North of Boston." But Maxwell extends this form of dramatic personae to broader, almost epic proportions. The poem begins in pre-9/11 New York City at a bar tended by a man who speaks in sestinas (beautifully and quite believably so, it must be noted). There, the poet meets a survivor of London's World War II "Black Saturday" bombings, who tells him a story filled with longing, childhood visions, and terror. The narrative flows with forceful, almost cinematic quality, with the poet always alert to the music of the phrase as well as the forces of the narrative as a whole. Above all, there is a supreme reason for Maxwell's formalism in these pages-not merely for the sake of dogma, as is unfortunately the case of many formal poets writing today, but because his formal verse represents Maxwell's own brand of humanism, where refrains and incantations are never just devices or maneuvers but always a vehicle that displays the depth and surprises of human pathos. This book will be read for years and years to come; highly recommended.-Ilya Kaminsky, writer in residence, Phillips Exeter Acad., NH Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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