'Breakage' offers visual, modern poetry

Chad Chisolm

DM Staff writer

As a reader of modern poetry, I tend to favor blank and free verse forms of writing simply for these reasons: in my opinion the art of poetry does not lie in meter, but in the poet's capabilities to use original powerful images, and the poet's abilities to add a new 'flavor' that has never been added before.

Also, the basic principles of meter and rhyme are not hard to grasp, even for the most inartistic man or woman, and sometimes can make poetry look poor and simple.

For example, look at this couplet from Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism:"

"Our sons their father's failing language see/

And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be."

You can see how this traditional style can make the verses look silly, or stupid, and I personally believe this style of rhyming and metering is one of the reasons that poetry is not seen its true power today.

I also believe that a poet should gather all his skills to sell his art, and Glyn Maxwell does this well. His lines are carefully and beautifully metered lines and his gentle endings rhyme very naturally, going beyond the basic protocol. Not many modern poets have the patience or the skill to do this. Compare these lines with some lines from Maxwell's poem, "An August Monday," from his newest volume, The Breakage:

"Late sun we had, stale sandwiches and hardly space/

To sit in and a young man with a country face/

Right next to us kept dozing on our bit of rug/

And kicking and he broke my Coronation mug..."

Also, I'm impressed with Maxwell's use -- in the traditions of Robert Frost, Edward Thomas and the World War I poets -- of simple language.

In his book Maxwell basically holds to two different styles: the first is a more tightly controlled style, mostly iambic tetrameter, like in his opening poem "The Breakage:"

"We kneel and start. And blood comes/

Like luck to the blue fingers/

Of children thinking they can help..."

The second form is a looser form of metered verse that mostly uses iambic pentameter and hexameter, which I personally favor more like in the poem "Mooncalves:"

"Mooncalves. It wouldn't take a crime/

To bring her in, they joked in a corridor/

Pasting up her picture. Ask what time/

It was they'd slap and bellow time for more ...'"

The containment is exceptional. Maxwell is taking a form that really seems to be becoming a formality, and using it to his advantage, and besides that, he does it very well. He has a talent for arranging common words with traditional meter into a brutally naturalistic picture at human insensitivity, exact opposite of the last passage.

Many would say that poetry has suffered more than any art in the world, and it's hard for me to dispute them when I look at the so-called 'best' literary magazines. Some say that poetry has followed T.S. Eliot's dream of cinematic images too far.

Well, those dissatisfied can be satisfied, because I think that Maxwell is no "filmstrip" poet. His poetry is often a mixture of the Romantic "I," with an introspective voice, very visual images, and to quote from Joseph Brodsky, "Glyn Maxwell covers a greater distance in a single line than most people do in a poem."