486
PARTISAN REVIEW
Though four hundred pages of slant-rhymed terza rima would argue
the seriousness of Glyn Maxwell's ambition for his book-length poem,
Time's Fool
quickly loses its lyric bearings. With the story of Edmund
Lea, a seventeen-year-old who in
1970
loses his girlfriend, kills a man,
and is condemned to ride a ghost train forever, the book echoes the
myth of the Flying Dutchman. Maxwell's touch, however, is lighter than
Wagner's as he introduces a stand-in for himself in the guise of a young
poet named "Glen," as well as Wasgood and Polly, two characters who
return with Edmund every seven years to his hometown of Hartisle on
Christmas Eve.
Maxwell's playful use of "Glen" as a foil turns the question of who
is speaking the poem into a postmodern sideshow. But such antics are
disconcerting amid the poem's pointed discourse on memory and loss,
as when Edmund explains:
I am the one
who lives in Hell, who rides alone in Hell,
remembering. My eyes are on the line
of land in the faint light, it is a gentle
drawing-out of pain, till pain becomes
normality.
It
is the winding spindle,
winds everything, it neither spares nor blames,
it just recalls
to
mind until that mind
divests itself of day, and then of dreams.
The oracular tone here
sounds
like that of a seventeen year old, and it's
a problem from which the book suffers throughout as Edmund con–
stantly reminds us of his ill fate. Furthermore, by choosing a protago–
nist who hasn't lived long enough or deeply enough for us to really feel
the immensity of his loss, Maxwell seems to corner himself from the
start. Instead, inside the "diseased interior" of his plight, Edmund finds
that all "expression was extinguished, as if reeled
I
backwards to me."
Sadly, this doesn't leave much for the reader to latch onto, nor is there
much for Edmund to report on while riding the ghost train, thus leav–
ing him to only speak in a sort of perpetual vacuum.
That may be the way with life on a ghost train, but it also makes curi–
ous what the poem is actually trying to accomplish. Edmund's urge is
simply "to tell the tale, tell what the journey meant
I
make it require
some good of us," but just what this "good" entails is very hard to
