Pluto - the non-planet, the ex-planet - is the dominant celestial influence in G
lyn Maxwell's new collection: Pluto is a book about change, the before-and-after
of love, the aftermath of loss: change of status and station, home and place, o
f tense and pronoun. It also marks a radical departure for one of our most celeb
rated English poets: his formidable skills as a rhetorician and dramatist are su
ddenly directed inwardly, to produce poems of brutal self-examination, raw elegy
, and strange songs of the kind those bruising encounters often leave us singing
to ourselves. In Pluto, Maxwell has set out something like a metaphysic of the
affair; the result is a lean and concentrated poetry of great emotional power, a
nd far and away Glyn Maxwell's most directly personal work to date.
