When Glyn Maxwell steps into an uptown Manhattan bar a few days before September 11, 2001, he is confronted by Joseph Stone, a barstool regular. 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. His story brings his lost neighbors back in order 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 — just as we know the city faces its own catastrophic moment in history.

"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 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.'