I will be giving a reading from this year’s Pushkin Press publication, Change Your Life: Essential Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. The reading is being organised, and taking place at Heron Books in Bristol as follows:

Heron Books Unit 5, The Clifton Arcade
Bristol, BS8 4AA United Kingdom + Google Map

Join us for Poetry In Herons with Martyn Crucefix

Join us in the Arcade after hours for our monthly poetry series. 6pm, Saturday 17th August. We will be celebrating the publication of Martyn’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, Change Your Life. 

You can buy tickets in advance online or in the shop. For more details and booking click here
Tickets are £4 or free with the purchase of Change Your Life. All tickets include a glass of something sparkling on arrival.

Tickets are fully redeemable against buying the books on the night.
Book orders will be ready for you to pick up and get signed at the event.

And here’s a taster poem – an unusual one from Rilke which perhaps we read these days with an ecopoetic slant – a translation of a poem in German by Rainer Maria Rilke (from New Poems II; The Other Part (1908)

Dolphins

Those realists were happy for their kind

to thrive, content that they lived anywhere,

sharing a sense of kinship, they found signs

of their peers in the ocean’s fluid empire,

which the old sea god, with dripping tritons,

would sometimes stir to tempest and flood;

for there surfaced the creature that showed

itself to be far more than the dumb,

dull-witted breed of fish: blood of their blood,

and distantly inclined to the human.

x

A school of them, rolling, leaping, appeared,

seeming conscious of the glittering sea:

joyful, trusting, warm-blooded, they wreathed

the sea voyage with their brave assembly

and would sport round the ship’s prow with ease,

as if tracing the curved outlines of a vase,

heedless, blessed, never fearing injury,

now enraptured, breaching, speeding along

and diving deep as if to exchange places

with the waves that calmly bore the trireme on.

x

And the sailors took these newly discovered

friends into their lives of lonely hazard

and they contrived for these companions—

and believed it true—a world of gratitude,

in which they loved gods and music and gardens

and the year’s silent, deep constellations.