This photo provides the front cover of The Breakage; it also offers Maxwell an opportunity to reflect, in a typically local and modest way, on the First World War itself. He recalled, as he introduced the poem, a day in his own childhood when his family had taken his grandfather back to the battlefields of Northern France, “he had never spoken about his experiences there to anyone before, and after talking all day about it, he never did again.”

About to line the trenches and survive,

Alone, as luck would have it, of the five.

This poem, like much of Maxwell’s work, works out of a specific location in his own childhood. He read it polyphonically, letting the dry and witty formal turns rub against a more casual, Londoner-in-a-pub style of delivery—a pleasure in the poem as story. Before this reading, my acquaintance with Maxwell’s work was limited to his earliest poems, some of which, as he has himself admitted, are formally tight to the point of obliquity, and a sort of surreal terseness.

The long poem with which he ended allowed a very different Maxwell to emerge—more ruminative, speculative and, I’m tempted to say, more American. The frustrated script writer? Based on the story of the Flying Dutchman, “Time’s Fool” is written in a loose terza rima: still carefully turned, but driven by narrative rather than the internal demands of metre. It seemed entirely appropriate after the reading when, over a glass of pallid Chardonnay, he told me that “strangely, I found it easier to publish this poem in America...it won’t be coming out in Britain until September.”