Time's Fool is about a man who is a ghost on a ghost train, who is not dead, but fixed: to his age, to his state. He sees his friends wrinkle, his parents shrink, and only once every seven years, on Christmas Eve, can he get off at Hartisle and take a walk about the place. Time's Fool is a verse novel: tight, inventive, sheer; rhythmical and rapid and clever and keen. It is an essay in opposites, and the still moment, (of waiting, wanting, wondering, relenting), against the course of seconds that run into hours, that run into years - of metamorphoses, of ends. Speed, slowness, passing-ness. And here, eight lots of neat, discrete visitors through the door so far. Edmund Lea or Hartisle or neither. The mirror hangs over the radiator; over the accidental light sculpture which doesn't have an on/off switch but seven different settings of fade in/out.
XXVI
The seventh year was hills seen from afar,
the mistiest of blue, its weeks and days
all estimates. A keeness in the air
I took for autumn in a pinewood place
we glided through forever, and the frost
I called No-temper, I required ice
on every pane and from myself a mist
at every breath before Descender came,
and then my joke was 'under train-arrest'
Maxwell, Glyn. Time's Fool. Picador, London, 2001
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