Tale of The Mayor's Son

Glyn Maxwell's eagerly awaited first book will confirm his reputation as one of British poetry's most exciting new talents, a highly imaginative writer who already has a readership in America as well as at home. Home is an English New Town, a Garden City, the strangest of ordinary places, providing a backdrop for much of Maxwell's work as well as the images that govern it. Love, now simple, now sexual, now bright and naive, now dark and obsessive; the comedy, hypocrisy, and horror of Authority; the absurdities of television, stardom, and advertising: the heroism of the decent and the wisdom of the undecided: these are his themes – and above all the fragility and sting of life, the pain of time passing.