Life and letters | 15 January 2005

The presentation of this year’s Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize — an annual literary award given, in alternate years, to a volume of poetry and a novel — was an occasion for harmony and reconciliation. The party took place on the penthouse floor of Faber & Faber’s offices in Queen Square, but the winner was not a Faber poet. Rather, it was Glyn Maxwell, whose latest volume of poetry, The Nerve, is published by Picador. It was described by the judges as ‘adventurous, deft, mysterious, and intellect- ually as well as emotionally penetrating,

the work of a poet who uses all the octaves on the keyboard’. This must have been a matter of quiet satisfaction for Maxwell. He used to be a Faber poet but left them for Picador in the highest of dudgeon in 2000 when Faber’s poetry editor Paul Keegan — a man whose judgment is widely respected, despite his styling his hair like John

Cooper Clarke — rejected Maxwell’s Time’s Fool, a 400-page poem in terza rima, for publication.