On Poetry (The Writer's Toolkit) - Softcover

The most compelling, original, charismatic and poetic guide to poetry that I can remember. A handbook written from the heart by one of the true modern masters of the craft. --Simon Armitage

[This] is a tremendously good book, and should be read by anyone who writes poetry and anyone who's interested in how and why poetry is written. It's a master class in close reading and close writing that is, in paying proper attention to the weight of words and their various shades of meanings, to their musical value and how one word affects its neighbour... This is the best book about poetry I've ever read; certainly the only one that's made me laugh out loud. Maxwell's students are lucky to have him, and so are the rest of us. --Adam Newey, The Guardian

Glyn Maxwell's effusive little book On Poetry is one of the best guides I have ever read to the greatest and most intimidating of all the literary forms. Maxwell is himself a poet and he wears his expertise confidently but casually. He takes on daunting, recondite concepts and elucidates them stylishly and personably, in the same spirit by which Roger Fry demystified the Post-Impressionists and Julia Child universalized the Quiche Lorraine, On Poetry navigates a welcoming middle path between hidebound tradition and the free-for-all of formlessness. It reminds us that although only a select few are called to be Poets, reading, writing, and loving poetry is for anyone. --Sam Sacks, Open Letters Monthly

Glyn Maxwell has long been regarded as one of Britain's major poets. He has been awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Prize, and the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as being shortlisted three times for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes.