Drinks With Dead Poets

Glyn Maxwell is a poet, novelist, and playwright. He has published twelve collections of verse, including Pluto, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, Hide Now, which was shortlisted for both the Forward and T.S. Eliot, and The Nerve, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Poetry is a pitiless mistress... This paradox of irritation and compulsion hovers behind Glyn Maxwell's brilliantly unclassifiable new book... Professor Maxwell arrives on a mysterious campus in a dream-state, having no clue where he is or what he is supposed to be doing. This tallies exactly with the experience of arriving at a new university, whether as staff or student... In this dream world, only Thursdays exist and all the visiting poets are dead ones. Not quite getting the hang of it at first, the narrator wonders who the "frock-coated emo" is, hanging around outside, talking about bonnets. It's only little Johnny Keats! Despite a stellar term's line-up, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson and WB Yeats, the elusive students are hard to impress... A prefatory note explains that although the poets' utterances come verbatim from their writings, these biographical sketches, "like the village and the students and their mystified professor, are works of make-believe"... [a] wholly brilliant evocation of a mysterious university campus, its students and visiting lecturers