Pluto -- the non-planet the ex-planet -- is the dominant celestial influence in Glyn Maxwell's new collection: Pluto is a book about change the before-&-after of love the aftermath of loss: change of status & station home & place of tense & pronoun. It also marks a radical departure for one of our most celebrated English poets: his formidable skills as a rhetorician & dramatist are suddenly directed inwardly to produce poems of brutal self-examination raw elegy & strange songs of the kind those bruising encounters often leave us singing to ourselves. In Pluto Maxwell has set out something like a metaphysic of the affair; the result is a lean & concentrated poetry of great emotional power & far & away Glyn Maxwell's most directly personal work to date.