The breakage

"A series of verse letters to the English poet Edward Thomas, killed in the First World War, forms the centerpiece of this new collection. Like most of the poems, it expresses a deep concern for England, past and present. Other poems, whether lyrical or narrative, comic or contemplative, explore love and fatherhood, triumph and longing. Some are adventures from the known to the ineffable; some draw on the poet's travels and his new home in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The title poem's sharp depiction of loss introduces a volume whose range of form and mood is as surprising and vigorous as that of Maxwell's literary forebears - Auden, Larkin, and even Robert Frost, whose time in both England and America he evokes."--BOOK JACKET.