Hugh Maxton Biography

"Maxton's poems take nothing for granted although, strangely, the problem of personal identity isn't as important as the changing bond between past and present or between person and place. I suppose these poems have learned something in philosophic tone from Thom Gunn and, in language, from Lowell – but the end result is very much Maxton's own. The ambivalence of his stance towards reality is never less than interesting and often “ because we share the struggle in the language of the poem “ exciting. Not that the poems are hermetic or obscure. Maxton is, for the most part, very exact about his estrangements."

Peter Bland in The London Magazine (1977)

The first poems appeared in the late 1960s in The Dublin Magazine, The Kilkenny Magazine, Hayden Murphy's Broadsheet, The Malahat Review etc. A memoir, Waking (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1997), describes his southern Irish protestant upbringing in the years before these early publications. One attempt at fiction has got into print-*A Wild Night at the Avondale Hotel* (Dublin: Cathair Books). A play, 'The Dog in Office', is available for production.

Maxton was elected to Aosdana 1984, the painter Cecil King being one of his nominators. Interdisciplinary collaborations (with the painter Mary FitzGerald, and the composer John Buckley) followed. He has twice served on its executive committee (or Toscaireacht) and chaired the annual assembly. Collaboration with painters has been a feature of his work, commencing with "Mary FitzGerald's Drawing Room"; (published in The Puzzle Tree Ascendant, 1988). The original exhibition had been prepared for the Oliver Dowling Gallery in Dublin, and Maxton recognized in it an elegiac quality the painter suggested was her tribute to Cecil King who had died in 1986. A series of coincidences emerged in ensuing conversations. FitzGerald was living in a house familiar to Maxton since his childhood, when it had been owned by relatives on his mother's side. (King had been best man at Maxton's half-brother's wedding in 1952. Maxton's mother's name had been King . . .) The Puzzle Tree Ascendant includes "Geometric Progression" by FitzGerald who also supplied a painting for the cover.

Other artists with whom Maxton has worked include Fionnuala ní Chiosáin (see Swift Mail, 1992), and Margaret Fitzgibbon (*hOMAGHe*),
2004). See also 'Verse and Prose To Concern the Damaged Art of Margaret Fitzgibbon' issued to mark the installation of Fitzgibbon's 'Hortus Conclusus' at the Crawford Gallery, Cork, October 2002. A number of poems in At the Protestant Museum (Dolmen, 1986) - notably "Catalogue: 3 April 1983" and 'Series' - have a declared relationship with the visual arts. One of the previously unpublished pieces in The Engraved Passion (1991) - "Burning Bushes 1890-1990" - was written in response to an exhibition of work by the Belgian artist, Camiel van Breedam, which Maxton saw in Budapest. The world has now survived in the era of Bush Junior.
hOMAGHe was conceived as means of raising funds for the surviving victims of a Real IRA bombing in August 1998 in which twenty-nine people were killed, including a woman pregnant with twins. The edition of 100 signed copies £70 or 100) brings together two poems by Maxton and four images by Fitzgibbon. All aspects of the work were provided free (including printing, paper etc.): the distributor is Peter Rowan, Carleton House, 92 Malone Road, Belfast BT9 5HP, Northern Ireland (ph 00 44 (0)28 90 666 448).

The Omagh atrocity is not the only occasion of that kind which has prompted Maxton to write or re-publish material. Both The Birmingham Six; An Appalling Vista (1990) and Later On; The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology (2004) include poems by him. In all three terrorist cases, no final or reliable declaration of responsibility has been reached.

Irish poetry is notoriously shy of experiment. Those few poets this century who moved away from the conservative centre to find new forms in the shock of new material have often been overlooked. Hugh Maxton has made this journey with absolute conviction and, in the process, transformed the terms by which we should read poetry in Ireland.

Gerald Dawe in an Afterword to The Engraved Passion; New and Selected Poems 1970-1991.

On The Noise of the Fields (1976);

"A sense of the past is the dominating theme of this fine collection, and helps us to approach Maxton's long poem, ˜Mastrim: a Meditation', a fantasia upon an Irish estate developed by the Edgeworth family. Along with his humility towards the configurations of history goes a reverence for the natural world which is conceived, like the past, as something inviolably given, gratis. This is the point at which Maxton's rather Puritan sensibility becomes most evident."

Andrew Swarbrick in The PN Review.