In this book-length "tale in verse," Edmund Lea spends 49 years on a train to nowhere, through nowhere, with no one, stopping once every seven years on Christmas Eve in his hometown where everyone he's known and loved has aged, moved on, died. He's perpetually 17.
The book moves between Edmund's time on the train and these Christmas Eve stops--during which he has the night to discover the secret that will release him from his curse--and his endless ride. The rhythm of the book--a combination of both the narrative and the meter--is this:
The holidays in Hartisle punctuate the flow of the whole with crowds and noise and speed, and in those sections the poem picks up slang, elisions, contractions, a tumble of place names, jokes. Beneath the sections on the train, the meter chugs along chukka chukka chukka chukka, chukka chukka chukka chukka, with an occasional woo woo!
There are three figures on the train with him: Happy Hour, the dining-car attendant; Inspector Tick, who berates him daily for having no ticket; and the Conductor. Occasionally another passenger will appear, or Edmund will run into someone on one of his permitted rambles into nameless fields outside the train. He speaks to them, but when they answer their words are in no language he can understand. He resorts to speaking both his own part and that of Happy Hour.
With friends and family who "disbelieve" he is who he claims to be, and his train companions with whom he cannot converse, Edmund struggles to communicate. Anything. To anyone. He meets a poet on the train, and takes up writing himself. But each morning his notebook is blank. He turns to sketching, watercolors, with the same result: blank sheets each morning. So he memorizes a poem--in terza rima--the story of his trip and his attempts to disembark forever. As playwright (in making conversation with HH), writer, and artist, he has failed to make his mark. The memorized poem (the book) means nothing until he can pass it to a hearer, a reader.
No spoilers here, but after trying several desparate ploys to break the curse, Edmund finally succeeds, though he doesn't achieve the ending he'd hoped for. Read it now. Glyn Maxwell will be in NYC soon: April 12 at KGB, and also some time (that I can't find right now) at the Bowery Poetry Club.
Again, thanks to Mike for this recommendation for SF poetry. I'd picked up a book of Maxwell's before on the recommendation of Susan Wheeler a coupla years ago, but this one really hit the spot. I've found a few other things to scratch the SF/poetry itch with as well, which I will surely report on here.
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