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.)
