One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011

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 fal...