Time's Fool tells the tale of Edmund Lea, a young man condemned to eternity alone until he determines how to lift the curse upon him. Edmund perpetually rides a phantom train except on Christmas Eve every seven years, when he is allowed to revisit his English hometown. He tries to break the spell by way of love, repentance, and death all in vain. Time passes, from 1970 to 2019, but Edmund remains seventeen, unable to age but watching the world grow older. Infused with a dark humor and an almost unbearable nostalgia, Time's Fool is a brilliant achievement, "classic yet hip, stylized yet inventive" (Scotsman).
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Time's Fool: A Tale in Verse
Time's Fool tells the tale of Edmund Lea, a young man condemned to eternity alone until he determines how to lift the curse upon him. Edmund perpetually rides a phantom train except on Christmas Eve every seven years, when he is allowed to revisit his English hometown. He tries to break the spell by way of love, repentance, and death all in vain. Time passes, from 1970 to 2019, but Edmund remains seventeen, unable to age but watching the world grow older. Infused with a dark humor and an almost unbearable nostalgia, Time's Fool is a brilliant achievement, "classic yet hip, stylized yet inventive" (Scotsman).
Time's Fool tells the tale of Edmund Lea, a young man condemned to eternity alone until he determines how to lift the curse upon him. Edmund perpetually rides a phantom train except on Christmas Eve every seven years, when he is allowed to revisit his English hometown. He tries to break the spell by way of love, repentance, and death all in vain. Time passes, from 1970 to 2019, but Edmund remains seventeen, unable to age but watching the world grow older. Infused with a dark humor and an almost unbearable nostalgia, Time's Fool is a brilliant achievement, "classic yet hip, stylized yet inventive" (Scotsman).
Glyn Maxwell is the author of several books of poetry, including The Sugar Mile. He is also a dramatist whose plays have been staged in New York, Edinburgh, and London. Among other honors, he has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the E. M. Forster Prize. He was the poetry editor of the New Republic from 2001 to 2007.
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Excerpt
If I could have avoided what I had to tell I gladly would have, but my day had dawned, my voice had meaning: 'Look. We are in Hell.'
So my reflection said. I saw beyond his shoulder the dark wind and the wild trees waving to the sky, and a grey wound
of sky was where the darkness was least, an opening or a closing where a hole was yellow almost with a feel of west,
while the train groaned beneath us on the rail and didn't go. His smoke had crossed the floor and voyaged through my hands. I'd been in Hell
for fourteen years. I rose to meet his stare and held it, speaking: 'This day, I believe, I shall be briefly freed, because this hour
I've recognized my language, in yourself. I've counted to this day and now it's come. For I was damned to this on Christmas Eve
and don't know why, how long, or in whose name.' Glen turned his stare unchanging to the glass, then turned it down. He sat there for a time,
but suddenly relaxed, and with a voice from somewhere low and sad he asked my name...