Edmund Lea perpetually rides a ghost train — except every seven years on Christmas Eve, when he is allowed to revisit his home town.

Like Wagner's Flying Dutchman, Edmund is condemned to eternity alone until he determines how to lift the curse upon him. Time passes, from 1970 to 2019, but Edmund remains seventeen, unable to age and watching the world grow older. He tries in vain to break the spell by way of true love, repentance, hedonism; he tries to change the world and he tries to die. Characters move in and out of Maxwell's story like Dante's figures in Hell, but Edmund's own Virgil is a careless and unhelpful poet, a portrait of the author as a student. The tale is told in formal terza rima, but its language and tone, its humor and sense of homesickness, are decidedly contemporary. It is a brilliant achievement.

'"Beautiful and moving and authentic poetry can be written today; and we know this not least because Glyn Maxwell is writing it.\"'

"Beautiful and moving and authentic poetry can be written today; and we know this not least because Glyn Maxwell is writing it."

NEW CRITERION

"Glyn Maxwell has learned to do what all good poets do — he makes a

'"Maxwell has the dramatist's skill to set his characters in motion and orchestrate them . . . and the poet's knack for rhythmical pathos."'

'Glyn Maxwell was born in 1962 in Hertfordshire, England. He studied English at Oxford and poetry at Boston University. He is the poetry editor of the New Republic and the author of four New York Times Notable Books. Among the honors he has received are the Somerset Maugham Prize and the E. M. Forster Prize, which he was awarded in 1997 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Maxwell now lives with his wife and their daughter in the United States.'

Chapters

(with those years chiefly considered)

1. The Chance in Hell  1

1984 and 1977

2. We Did It in Music  45

1984

3. My First Poem  89

The Train and 1970

4. The Once  133

1970 and the Train

5. Mallarea  177

1991

6. A Child"s Recorder  221

1998

7. Demundo  265

2005

8. Still to Want You Gone  309

2012

9. The Candle Palace  353

2019