Rest for the Wicked

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Glyn Maxwell's precocious, prolific talent has earned him accolades such as 'England's brightest new poet for a decade', 'The Complete Modern English Poet', 'The Shakespeare of the Suburbs' and 'The Unstoppable Verse Machine'. His first collection Tale of the Mayor's Son was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His second, Out of the Rain, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, and won him the Somerset Maugham Award, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a place in the recent New Generation Poets promotion.His third collection, Rest for the Wicked, is another Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Its focus is men - and boys 'who are going to be boys, who have had to be men' ('The Boys at Twilight'). The poems sort the men from the boys: boys at play, men at war, boys grown up, men reverting, men in love and poetry and politics, running countries, ruining things. His versions of the Latin poet Ovid, Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun - 'fragments of an investigative documentary' - are really about male ambition and overreaching. But Maxwell is no male apologist: these are young man's poems: bold, assertive and stylish, going for the jugular and the jocular.