Hide Now, Glyn Maxwell’s eighth collection of poems, is set against the darkening backdrop of “my last century and yours”. Sugar Mile, his last volume, was written four years ago, in New York, and tiptoed as closely as it deemed tactful to the events of September 11, 2001. Hide Now is similarly marked by the fallout from those events, and is a strikingly pessimistic book. It contains leave-takings, elegies, apocalyptic endings and, throughout, poems spoken by Cassandra, imprisoned by Agamemnon: helpless, abused, doomed and relaying bad news to people who will not hear it.
The volume opens superbly with “The Old Lad”, a fear-of-flying poem for an age in which a transatlantic aeroplane trip has several extra fears attached to it. Opening with a carefully unspecific but suggestive image of unbearable catastrophe, it lays out an interesting predicament: the poet is looking “for ways to cope with coping with all this shit”. Not ways to cope: ways to cope with the very fact of coping, with writing from a place (however embattled) of safety and privilege. This has been a persistent theme for Maxwell, who has also spoken of how, lately, “nothing has preoccupied me more than time itself. That’s what a poet who has lived only in good times will have to come to in the end”.
“The Old Lad” wavers between the cynical smile of those who (as a later poem will put it) think life is no more than “a grin into the mist”, the fake smile of a stewardess who “can do it [while] hissing info into phones”, and the smile of stoic resignation (“I’m going to die one day, and don’t care when”). But around the edges of that smile are some terrible realities:
Okay the neighbour’s starving, and okay he’s here.
Okay a billion times the bit we gave last year
let’s funnel into rubbish bags and tie the ties.
Okay the trains are pulling out and full of eyes.
Okay to sport a badge, okay to wave a cloth.
Okay some went forever and some won’t sod off.
Okay the ones like Cheney, whom you mustn’t name
and spoil the poem, do the motherfucking same as ever.
It’s a poem propelled by driving rhythms and a quite complex set of ambivalences and anxieties, haunted by questions of responsibility and helplessness which have always been present in the best of Maxwell’s work, and which are summed up near the end of Hide Now in the self-description: “a sliver of pure luck, / freedom, health, / statistically safe, / and yet aghast and tethered by the fibres / to everything”. The line about Dick Cheney, though, deliberately raises an issue (“whom you mustn’t name / and spoil the poem”). Maxwell’s poetry, like that of many who share his aesthetics, is most comfortable alluding to personal details, or to literature, myth and (mythologized) history. So it’s “okay” to elegize Osip Mandelstam, W. H. Auden and Joseph Brodsky, to invoke Robespierre, Saint-Juste and even Jim Jones, or to ventriloquize Cassandra: but, as that reference to Cheney is intended to remind us, it’s not seen as “okay” to refer to specific contemporary political events, processes and figures.
The fear, perhaps, is that such references date badly; and this sort of poetry aims ultimately for the timeless and the universal, which inevitably creates a pervasive sense of compassionate fatalism. As Maxwell said of the characters in Sugar Mile, “thousands of innocent people were destroyed, and I wanted to amplify their voices beyond the historical or the political”. It’s a legitimate approach, and one in which Maxwell is strikingly successful: but in introducing Cheney simply as a type, and even then under the guise of not doing so, Maxwell does raise the question of what a properly complex account of “my last century and ours” might look like – before choosing not to write it.
Hide Now is, however, explicit about the tricky relationship between poet (or prophet) and those in power: the Mandelstam elegy is frank about the imbalance of pen and sword (as are the poems on Cassandra and Scheherazade, and “Old Smile At the Roast”). Mandelstam’s name is “a bothering hand on the lapels / of Stalin”, easily “brushed away”: and “neither of them / strikes me as caring greatly about the dull / ache the other makes elsewhere in his skull”, until that ache becomes unbearable for either or both:
where hurt
and thought converge and clarify the future
with nothing but new words, whether a line
begun forever or one jotted sentence.
There are a couple of poems here – “The Switch” and “Rendition” – that respond to the death penalty and CIA torture, respectively; but elsewhere the specific fears and cruelties of this decade are mediated in cryptic allegories (“A Play of the Word”, “Forty Forty”, “Martial Diptych”, “Tale of the Story-of-all-Stories”, “The Tinsel Man”) or dramatic monologues (“One Thousand Nights and Counting” and the Cassandra poems). Hide Now demonstrates the fluency and rhythmic control that have distinguished Glyn Maxwell’s work from the start. It also circles, as all his books have done, around the fragility of innocence, especially childhood innocence, and his anguish, as a poet or citizen, at being – as he says of his daughter – “helpless in the face of / her helpless face”.