Oh Maris - little boy amongst the men of the bodyguard, the innocent farm boy. Why did you neglect your job - can't you concentrate and not get distracted by pretty girls?

A flight of modern fantasy, Maris is at once upright citizen of the occupying forces, a man of responsibility, a traitor, an outlaw, a spy, a seer, a lover and a savant. Our hero leads us through an accidental journey that provides hope for us all that our lifes journey is worth taking and that the destinations, although they are not where we were originally heading, are still worth getting to.

This book has stopped me playing 'scissors/paper/stone' since I read it when it came out, but has also provided joy in reading many times since. The language is playful and elaborate - Glyn Maxwell shows his pedigree as a poet to the full, and the characters are simple, complex and effective, but full of life.

My favourite book to take to the desert island...

Glyn Maxwell's "Rest for the Wicked," is an impressively crafted, inventive and human book of poetry. Dealing with feelings, ironies, problems that men may go through, Maxwell gets to the quick of the situations, business, the awkward meeting of an old classmate, the day of a proposal to a woman with crunching diction, at turns playful and carved sound and rhyme. There's a great poem about schoolyard games that brings all the bile and violence of life to the almost jocular language of schoolkids. Yet in the wide range of imagined situations, men are never touchy feely: The tone holds the scorched chuckling dryness that some men infuse right into their speech, clothes, manner. Maxwell's voice tunes traditional rhymed verse to the slang and history conscious ear of a contemporary Brit, the knitting together of the two: stunning. Check out his work in Bloodaxe's New Poetry, (from 1994?) as well.

I sometimes wonder why young writers allow their publishers to talk them into releasing a "selected poems" volume. Almost invariably, they will come to see much of their earliest work as a development, not a finished product. That fact is very much in evidence in this work. Maxwell makes selections from his first 3 books, and each book is more accomplished than the one before. His formalism becomes more assured with each successive book. As such, I recommend this book to people interested in Maxwell from his other works, or who are interested in neo-formal poetry in general. Be aware, though, that you can't judge the whole book by the first few poems.