In one poem in Glyn Maxwell's first collection, a hissed, italicized interruption iterated the demand "Be more specific". True to form, Maxwell's subsequent clarifications focused on unexpected aspects of his subject, as if in a deliberate misunderstanding of the instruction. One of the strengths of the volume was Maxwell's ability metonymically to strip character and event down to what he found important: the choices and restrictions, the vying desires and devices of private individuals in corporate worlds. The less impressive moments in Tale of the Mayor's Son were those when a quasi-New York voice spoke too loudly, or when Maxwell's impenetrable abstractions and surreal ellipses seemed an end in themselves.
Out of the Rain, Maxwell's second book, maintains, even improves on, the formidable technical skill evident in the first (the bravura with which he manipulates a range of verse forms has deservedly led to comparisons with Auden). The new volume is, also, "more specific"; the narratives are more often realistic or less obliquely allegorical, decked out in necessary details, precise epithets. Granted, there are still moments when abstract entities are accorded a thumping upper-case status, as though they'd escaped from an exuberant e.e. cummings poem ("Money / Zips his bag at this / Crosses the human out and flies / To where more Money is"), and, as with cummings, the reader occasionally has to wrestle with some tortured syntax. These manoeuvres, though, are never less than purposeful.
A consistently positive employment of enjambment characterizes work which is keen to make every word count, and sometimes count double or treble, abetted by the misreadings, rereadings and slow unfoldings Maxwell forces through line-breaks, syntax, puns and nervy qualifications; "I do not think we need to be, and are not, / informed the sky is poisonous to all / intents and purposes / forever". Maxwell wants to know not only what we are, but what we might be, as "This could be – it's the opposite – a paradise / Peopled with innocents". The title-poem toys with the Noah story to picture a moment of lapsarian crisis when a world of fruitful duality, peopled by animals and their Others, including unicorns, is lost, with no one seemingly bothered but the narrator, who surveys with baffled nostalgia the complacent, forgetful survivors. The jolly romp of this long poem decelerates into banality, denial, grief:
I swam and thought of the dead. I thought
"They're dead."
(I was known as a thinker at school I'll have you know.)
I thought of the things I'd seen, and thought
"I didn't
see those things." (I was known as a liar too.)
I swam over trees, and everything I'd once
ran through, and it all seemed much
simpler . . . .
Maxwell detests simplicity, and delights in the "Great Perhaps", in the ability to conjure "the winged 'Or'", the full spectrum of a biodiverse world. The conformities of games shows, soap operas, Hollywood, adland or television are all smartly and satirically dispatched by a writer who knows his targets. It is the homogeneity of a consumer world offering such duff choices which justifies Maxwell's grander gestures, as in "We Billion Cheered", where "the waving dead of a waving war . . . clap a man / for an unveiled familiar new plan", and an insidious "It" evades inspection by virtue of the hand-tying media:
Don't forget
Nothing will start that hasn't started yet
Don't forget
It, its friend, its foe and its opposite.
That nod towards the history of events is apparent elsewhere: "Amigo, you anticipate just conclusions" one speaker warns. As Maxwell emphasizes, process and participants are more important than simple results; and, taking the line another way, there are few happy endings. In an evocation of a divided Africa, "chains are busted into a thousand chains. / One struggle grows a powerful one face." This is Auden territory, that "myriad face" in places of real evil; a crowd howls with Nuremberg echoes for "a boom, a spot, a cue, a one word roared / Repeated, roared, chanted, sung to a drum. / Or klaxoned over a sloping sea of foam / Until it's all there is" in a paean to Didymus ("there is a saint for doubt"). Many of these poems carry tones of "1 September 1939", not least "In Herrick Shape For Her", a love poem besieged by images of London's homelessness where Maxwell shows his own, tentative, affirming flame.
There is an acknowledgement, beneath this indignant, blokeish humanism, that Maxwell colludes in the inequalities elucidated by each of his oppositions. Two pieces, both flecked with sexual desire, deal with the pitiable privileged wealthy in moments before real or potential catastrophe, and isolate the easier judgments of hindsight from the impotence of the moment; "admit it / we are gods at retrospect". Mocking the alternatives to passive involvement ("I'd have had to have . . . thrown her in the back of my / 2CV and motored to kingdom come", the sassy cliché highlighting the utopianism), Maxwell makes his excuses: "this happens to, and happens to be, me".
The gentler aspects of this far-ranging collection are still marked by the language of lucre and embattled sentiment, sited in a world where "leaden, beaten love / does with what it has", but allow for cheeky rewrites of fairy-tales and some Doisneau-style snaps of gritty, lyrical moments. To say that a few of the pieces are merely technically excellent hardly reflects badly on Maxwell. Out of the Rain must stand as one of the most important and enjoyable volumes of recent English poetry, and represents remarkable progress from the already high standards of his début. At the end of the title-poem in that collection Maxwell wrote, "Meanwhile the books / will pile up in my world, and someone's hat / will find its way to me and I will wear it". Maxwell has several hats now, and they fit, excellently fit.