Time's Fool tells the tale of Edmund Lea, a young man condemned to eternity alone until he determines how to lift the curse upon him. Edmund perpetually rides a phantom train -- except on Christmas Eve every seven years, when he is allowed to revisit his English hometown. He tries to break the spell by way of love, repentance, and death -- all in vain. Time passes, from 1970 to 2019, but Edmund remains seventeen, unable to age but watching the world grow older. Infused with a dark humor and an almost unbearable nostalgia, Time's Fool is a brilliant achievement, "classic yet hip, stylized yet inventive" (Scotsman).

Time's Fool

A Tale in Verse

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By Glyn Maxwell

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2002 Glyn Maxwell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 061825756X

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Excerpt

If I could have avoided what I had to tell
I gladly would have, but my day had dawned,
my voice had meaning: "Look. We are in Hell."

So my reflection said. I saw beyond
his shoulder the dark wind and the wild trees
waving to the sky, and a grey wound

of sky was where the darkness was least,
an opening or a closing where a hole
was yellow almost with a feel of west,

while the train groaned beneath us on the rail
and didn"t go. His smoke had crossed the floor
and voyaged through my hands. I"d been in Hell

for fourteen years. I rose to meet his stare
and held it, speaking: "This day, I believe,
I shall be briefly freed, because this hour

I"ve recognized my language, in yourself.
I"ve counted to this day and now it"s come.
For I was damned to this on Christmas Eve

and don"t know why, how long, or in whose name."
Glen turned his stare unchanging to the glass,
then turned it down. He sat there for a time,

but suddenly relaxed, and with a voice
from somewhere low and sad he asked my name...

Copyright 2000 © by Glyn Maxwell

Continues...

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Excerpted from Time's Fool by Glyn Maxwell Copyright © 2002 by Glyn Maxwell. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Glyn Maxwell is the author of nine books of poetry, including, most recently, The Sugar Mile. He is also a dramatist whose plays have been staged in New York, Edinburgh, and London. His latest play, Liberty, had its world premiere in the summer of 2008 at Shakespeare's Globe. Among other honors, he has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the E. M. Forster Prize. He was the poetry editor of the New Republic from 2001 to 2007. He lives in London.