I'm a big fan of Glyn Maxwell's work, especially the Bloodaxe volumes. Even with the Audenesque which at times is a bit like Oasis to the Beatles, I think Maxwell is terrific. But I've lost sight of him, and where Armitage has soared into the popular stratosphere, Maxwell hasn't had the same shift in career since moving stateside. I read his work in US journals, but I don't really know if he has a discrete US reputation and the recent works seem less adventurous, less risky, they seem stiffer, calmer maybe. So I wonder if there are other fans here who miss him.

I also admire his work, with the reservation that he doesn't seem, from the poems I've read, to have a lot to write about, so there tends to be more style than substance. It's a pretty impressive style, though. And one of the best discussions I've ever had with a class of undergraduates was about his poem 'Drive to the Sea', which they were resistant to at first, but which eventually taught them a lot about contemporary poetry. I recently picked up Time's Fool in a second-hand bookshop and will get round to reading it eventually, but have been reading so many very long books recently (Don DeLillo's Underworld, Pepys's Diary) that I don't fancy another one for a while. Anyone read it?

Katy - who will no doubt be long any minute.

Re Chris's "where Armitage has soared into the popular stratosphere, Maxwell hasn't had the same shift in career since moving stateside. I read his work in US journals, but I don't really know if he has a discrete US reputation..."

...from my experience of relentlessly quizzing American poets and academics about what from over here is known / admired in America, I'd say that Maxwell is widely known and a fairly controversial figure - too formalist and sceptical for the innovative community, too singular and protean for the formalists. No one has mentioned Armitage's name to me in any such conversation. It may well be that, just as there are bands who don't cross the pond well, so with writers. I'm not sure if Simon has read much there or had one of those 'An Introduction to...' style Selecteds which Graywolf, Wake Forest and other presses do. I think American audiences would respond well to his readings, more so than his books alone.

Aha. Well I can tell you he has a new verse play currently on at the Arcola Theatre, 'The Only Girl in the World - a play of Jack the Ripper' and another verse play starting at The Globe in September. It's called 'Liberty' and it's about the French revolution. He also had a wonderful poem in the TLS a few months ago.

Thanks Roddy - but that was "The Sugar Mile" - which I enjoyed a lot; as Matthew says, sort of surprised into it. The voices were really effective. But I do agree, it read slightly as if he could have written it with one hand tied behind his back - it would have been nicer to feel it was more... that it somehow cost the writer a little more of himself...

But I did like it a lot, and two years later - no, more - I still remember the characters and their voices (sorry, there's that word again!) vividly. He created a really good effect.