Stars and stripes

摘要

For more than 70 years, the planet Pluto captured the imagination of those looking up to it from Earth. Small, dark and cold, it appeared not unlike the Greek underworld, of whose god it was named after (by an Oxfordshire schoolgirl in 1930). It stopped being a planet in 2006, but retains some of its mystery. Glyn Maxwell, a British poet and playwright, names his most recent collection of poetry after the ex-planet. Like it, this collection is a strange mix of the dark and the arresting. Mr Maxwell, born in 1962 and formerly the poetry editor for the New Republic, an American magazine, has a more subdued profile than many of his British and American contemporaries. "Pluto", a collection of 22 poems, could change that.