Glyn Maxwell's last book of poems, The Nerve, was declared "one of the most enjoyable books of the year" by the New York Times Book Review. In The Sugar Mile, Maxwell returns to the extended verse narrative he so brilliantly employed in Time's Fool, to juxtapose two cities on the brink of irrevocable change. The Sugar Mile begins when the poet steps into an uptown Manhattan bar a few days before September 11, 2001. He is confronted by Joseph Stone, a barstool regular and a fellow expatriate. "What a mess the young man's made . . . with his poetry pen . . . Warm the beer, Raul, there's an English gent/on duty." It has been almost exactly sixty-one years since London's "Black Saturday," the start of the worst of the Blitz during World War II. Joe is a survivor of the bombing, and his insistent story brings his lost neighbors back to share the terror and the peculiar beauty blooming in the chaos of their last days. Raul, the bartender, interrupts to brag about New York's wonders — as we begin to understand that the city soon will face its own catastrophic moment in history.

As Stone's memories grow more hallucinatory and the bar in New York ends another day, the chance encounter of two strangers takes on the inevitability of fate.

"After the lyric break of The Nerve (2002), Maxwell follows one ambitious if not altogether convincing book-length verse narrative (Time's Fool; 2000) with another, this time letting the story unfold through short poems. In September 2001, at an Irish pub in Manhattan, the poet meets a friendly bartender, Raul, and a sleepy old former Londoner, Joey, who delivered newspapers during the blitz. Most of the poems that follow are framed as Joey's recollections, and most use the voices of Londoners — children and adults, a grandmother, an air-raid warden — during September 1941. Joey gradually reveals the secrets that explain why he left London; Raul is given space to describe the life of the pub and hint that he will die in the Twin Towers attacks. Maxwell, who has been celebrated overseas for a decade as a witty English everyman, has been resident in the U.S. since the late '90s and serves as the New Republic's poetry editor. His formal technique is as strong as ever (especially in three fluent sestinas), and he still excels as a ventriloquist ('Will you still bring/ a paper to/ the ruins Joe?'), but the character development is thin. Maxwell implies, but never quite delivers, intellectual or psychological links between wartime London and post-9/11 New York; what's left — the melancholy of displaced Englishmen — doesn't quite let his new volume go the distance." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

'\"His formal technique is as strong as ever. . .and he still excels as a ventriloquist.\"'

'\"A book of such effortlessly delicate storytelling that one hardly notices how ambitious a project it actually is.\" --Jon Mooallem'

'\"Gripping . . . triumphant . . . a brilliant and deeply enjoyable book.\" --Robert Travers'

Glyn Maxwell is the author of nine books of poetry, including, most recently, The Sugar Mile. He is also a dramatist whose plays have been staged in New York, Edinburgh, and London. His latest play, Liberty, had its world premiere in the summer of 2008 at Shakespeare's Globe. Among other honors, he has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the E. M. Forster Prize. He was the poetry editor of the New Republic from 2001 to 2007. He lives in London.