Recommended Read - 'Pluto' (poetry collection) by Glyn Maxwell

‘Pluto’

By Glyn Maxwell
Published by Picador Poetry, April 2013
RRP £9.99 (paperback)
ISBN 9781447231585
Pluto – the non-planet, the ex-planet – is the dominant celestial influence in Glyn Maxwells 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, of tense and pronoun. It also marks a radical departure for one of our most celebrated English poets: his formidable skills as a rhetorician and dramatist are suddenly 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, and far and away his most directly personal work to date.