Description:
In this powerful new book, the unearthed bones of the dispossessed gather together to march; in rural England, the whinnying of horses heralds an apocalyptic unease; amid October storms, there rises an acute sense of decline and fall...
Brief description: Martyn Crucefix is a British poet, critic, blogger, and translator. He is the author of nine original collections of poetry, as well as several volumes of translations including Peter Huchel and Juergen Becker for Shearsman Books, and Rilke for Pushkin Press and Enitharmon. Crucefix has received an Eric Gregory award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translations (from the German) of the poems of Peter Huchel (2020). His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation. His translations of essays by German poet and novelist, Lutz Seiler, In Case of Loss, is published by And Other Stories and a major Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, has recently been published by Pushkin Press (2024). Until recently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library, Crucefix is also a tutor for the Poetry School in London and he edits the Acumen Poetry Magazine Young Poets web page.
Review Quotes:
"Crucefix has, as always, an exceptional ear... superbly intelligent . . . urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful." -Kathryn Maris
Comments on previous collections:
"Learning, no doubt, from the poetry he has translated... Crucefix has become more and more experimental, more complicatedly troubled... He knows how to find the imagistic essence of a situation and his gift for metaphor has always been considerable ... Walking Away demands to be read." -John Greening, on Walking Away (2025)
"[These are] despatches from a fond but fearful place - so close to the depths of loved-ones' old age ... Sharply observant of himself as well as what's around him, Crucefix is an acute but tactful guide to somewhere most of us, at any age, are loath to go." -Philip Gross, on Walking Away
"Crucefix's skill at managing sequences is stunning. In language that arrests, disturbs, and provokes reflection, each poem refracts and reflects the whole. By examining contemporary life in all its flawed difficulty... these poems call on us to witness how our vulnerability isolates and unites us." -Heidi Williamson, on Between a Drowning Man (2023)
"Crucefix has always been one of the most interesting and experimental of poets working in what's sometimes called the mainstream...We are firmly in the contemporary world of twitterstorm, Google Maps, Uber and wi-fi, yet somehow at an angle to it... the overall mood is not of gloom, but wonder - almost puzzlement at times. The clarity of the language begets a kind of luminosity." -Stuart Henson, on Between a Drowning Man