Life doesn’t always bloom the way you expect. Sometimes it prickles.
Thistle is a raw, searching collection that traces the arc from childhood wonder to middle-age reckoning — and everything bruising in between. These poems look back without flinching, finding beauty in imperfection and meaning in the mess.
Spanning stories and snapshots of growing up, growing wary, and growing weary, it also paints a changing country and consciousness where early wonder, and aspirations are increasingly floodlit by the glare of global decay. These poems capture the pain and beauty of holding on, preserving, or naming love. Sometimes tender and lyrical, many poems are brushed with a generous splash of scepticism and humour. Yet, beneath the cynicism, these poems still strive to believe, in the necessity of resilience.
‘There is a searing honesty and daringness, a readiness to confront the inherent complexities of our lives, in Maxwell’s third collection, but it is coupled with a very human tenderness. Little escapes the poet’s penetrating vision: the poems move from witnessing an ageing parent’s decline to dementia’s ‘cruel creep of unknowing’, to exposing the inherent absurdity of our ultra-technological world, where you have to click a box to ‘prove your own humanity’, to ruminating on Jonah’s state of mind ‘entombed’ for three days in the belly of the fish, ‘weeds wrapped about his wilful head’. Just as subjects span the deeply personal and the overtly political, tonally, the fifty-four poems range from poignant restraint to wryly humorous to frankly satiric. Truly a collection of our times, Thistle will delight and prod us in equal measure.’
Denise O’Hagan
Read a review of Thistle by Margaret Bradstock here.