Time's Fool

""When the train stopped I started and woke up./ Was nowhere, as before, no change in that."" As the Flying Dutchman suffered aboard his ghost ship, so Maxwell's Fool, Edmund Lea, suffers alone aboard his train, waiting for redemption from a sin he does not even at first recognize as such. Every seven years on Christmas Eve, beginning in 1977, Edmund is allowed to disembark from his train and spend one evening in Hartisle, his hometown. The inhabitants of that world believe he has run away of his own secret volition--a remarkable possibility, but not nearly as remarkable as the impossible and timeless world that he inhabits, stuck forever at age 17. Following in the wake of such recent verse-novels as Les Murray's phenomenal Fredy Neptune and W.S. Merwin's plodding Folding Cliffs, British ex-pat Maxwell, who got a lot of critical attention for his U.S. debut The Breakage last year, here checks in with his addition to this burgeoning genre. Apart from its Wagnerian netherworld, Time's Fool also bears a considerable Dantean influence: Edmund's journey counts among its ingredients an instructive guide (a grumpy poet, though, rather than a helpful philosopher); a lady love in the form of Clare Kendall, an old classmate; fellow travelers in the form of two long-suffering orphans, Pele and Wasgood; terror in the form of threatened eternal damnation and ferocious weather; and, ultimately, deliverance in female form--not to mention that the lines are in strict terza rima. Under the form's strictures, the narration can be labored and heavy, but Maxwell does find a synergy of form and content, with the best parts being descriptive rather than expository, as in one moment of Edmund's looking out the train window: ""I saw beyond/ [my] shoulder the dark wind and the wild trees/ waving to the sky, and a grey wound// of sky was where the darkness was least,/ an opening or a closing where a hole/ was yellow almost with a feel of west..."" The formal ambition of the project and Maxwell's relative success in carrying it off should wow more technically inclined readers and those looking for Fredy-like adolescent pleasures, minus the larger-scale import. More subtly ambitious, Maxwell's Boys selects from his first three U.K.-only releases and covers a wide and varied prosodic spectrum in its short time span. Most poems possess a slow, quiet fire, generally not announcing their emotion as much as offering it up in a waxed envelope. The pieces betray only the faintest well-chosen hints of what they are about, besides the quotidian--a man kills a wasp, a man falls in and out of love, a man escapes from an unnamed pursuer--but from those hints it is easy to extrapolate a world. Maddeningly little happens in these poems, and at its best, this quality bespeaks Blake's ""world in a grain of sand""--but at its worst, it's hard to hear the poems above the noise of a smug, schoolboyish pride in the success of their formal mechanics. Nevertheless, the collection's steadfast belief in the transcendence of the quotidian is as impossible to discount when reflected in the melancholy of entreaties to ""sit, forget/ the city-licking sound/ of water moving slowly through the Thames/ like years in thought."" The co-release of these two books is clearly a push for Muldoon (whose book-length Madoc: A Mystery was a career-builder) or Murray-like recognition, but, unfortunately, Senator, Edmund is no Fredy, and the novel's audience will remain confined to the poetically inclined. (Oct.)