Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term - Softcover

Maxwell, Glyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1786821400 ISBN 13: 9781786821409

Publisher: Oberon Books, 2017

Synopsis

The hit novel now available in £8.99 paperback. Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there but he has a strange feeling there s a class to teach. And isn't that Keats wandering down the lane? Why not ask him to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards? Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, the Brontės, the War Poets and many more all on their way to give readings in the humble village hall. In this one-of-a-kind novel, Maxwell takes writing exercises that he's used in real classes, and explores them with fictional students and major poets.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

“This novel packs so much truth and so many conspicuously educational moments―along with character studies of 12 major nineteenth-century poets and writers―that it defies classification. An intoxicating blend of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism.”
- Booklist (starred)

“Part dream-memoir, part picaresque novel, and part defense of the poetic art form, the book is a wholly brilliant and often comical evocation of a mysterious university campus, its students and visiting lecturers, and the altogether precarious status of poetry within contemporary academia. Brilliant.”
- Harvard Review

“If 19th-century poetry is a gap in your education, ­Maxwell’s charming and learned novel will fill it more than you could hope. It joins his marvelous nonfiction text, On Poetry; reading both is not required, but you’ll want to.”
- Library Journal

“Maxwell blurs the lines between prose and poetry and between fiction and reality as he takes readers on a surreal journey full of literary criticism and metrical analyses, all guided by the visiting poets who speak entirely in quotes from their real-life journals and letters. The surreal quality of the writing is offset by Maxwell’s wonderfully dry sense of humor. Readers of metafiction will enjoy this rabbit hole of luminary poets.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Part comic novel, part confession, part literary critique, Maxwell's book is both creative and self-indulgent, packed with quotations, musings, and dissections of rhyme schemes.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“Defiantly and exhilaratingly poetic. I like the urgency and stringency of Maxwell’s advice, and it should be useful to students coming to a poem. Arguing with this book is part of the joy of it: it’s provocative and opinionated and personal and urgent; by turns good-humored and intemperate; and full of earned advice on the writing and reading of poems.”
- Nick Laird, The New York Review of Books [praise for Glyn Maxwell’s 'On Poetry']

About this edition

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1786821400
• ISBN 13: 9781786821409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384