Month: August 2025

Autumn Reading Dates 2025

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A little flock of reading dates – replacing the swifts that have left our skies recently – have gathered themselves into something that almost resembles a brief Autumn Reading Tour. Admittedly, not going too far beyond the Greater London area – but to Maidstone and (briefly) Winchester – but of course I’m very happy to be granted these opportunities to read my work. Live links to these events are provided in the details below. And, as you’ll see from the details below, the chance to read with some really talented, inventive and entertaining poets along the way. In particular, I’ll be launching my new chapbook of poems – Walking Away – published by Paul O’Prey’s excellent Dare-Gale Press. If you are in any of the vicinities mentioned – I’d be delighted to see you there – Martyn

Wednesday 10th September – 8pm @ Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution, 11 South Grove, London N6 6BS – reading w/ Tim Ades and Maggie Brookes-Butt. HLSI Fundraising Event: Tickets £10 https://hlsi.org.uk/whats-on/poetry-please/

Sunday 28th September – 7.30pm @ Torriano Poetry, 99 Torriano Avenue, Kentish Town, London NW5 2RX w/ poet/translators Will Stone & Stephen Watts. Floor Readers welcome: £6 + concs https://torriano.org/whats-on/poetry/torriano-poetry-28-09-2025

Tuesday 7th October – 6.30pm @ Maidstone Literary Festival, Maidstone Museum, Saint Faith’s Street, Maidstone w/ Maggie Brookes-Butt & Nancy Charley. Open mic readers welcome: £8 https://www.maidstonelitfest.org/what-s-on-2025/poetry-open-mic-evening-hosted-by-maggie-brookes%2C-nancy-charley-%26-martyn-crucefix

Sunday 12th October – 2pm @ Winchester Poetry Festival, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester SO23 8SB – poetry prize anthology ceremony where I’ll be reading my long-listed poem – the prize winners to be announced on the day! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/winchester-poetry-prize-ceremony-2025-tickets-1431638672809

Saturday 25th October – 1pm @ The Small Publishers Fair, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion St, London WC1R 4RL reading w/ David Harsent. Free Event. This is a Dare-Gale Press reading, launching my chapbook which they are publishing: Walking Away. Free Event: https://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/

And on the SAME DAY I’ll be second launching the chapbook Walking Away…

Saturday 25th October – 7pm @ The Ship Poetry Reading Series, organised by Chris Beckett, 134 New Cavendish St. London W1W 6YB – reading w/ Barbara Cumbers, Jack Cooper, Anthony Joseph, + Fawzia Muradali Kane: £5 https://www.chrisbeckettpoems.com/news.html

Thursday 6th November – 7.30pm ON-LINE ONLY @ Fire River Poets, Taunton, Somerset. Open mic slots are available. Register for this event at: https://fireriverpoets.org.uk/2024/12/november-6th-2025-martyn-crucefix/

Aonghas MacNeacail’s English Language Poems Reviewed

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An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it.

It is as a poet writing in Gaelic that MacNeacail – who died in 2022 – is most well-known, though he would himself provide translations of his work into English, what, in the poem ‘last night’, he refers to as Gaelic’s ‘sister tongue’. There were also poems written in Scots and these variants give an insight into what Colin Bramwell here calls ‘the language situation in Scotland’ within which MacNeacail worked all his life. For a number of years, MacNeacail lived and wrote under the anglicised name Angus Nicolson, but always considered himself a tri-lingualist and antagonistic to the kind of divisiveness such a ‘situation’ might give rise to. His natural inclination was democratic, pacifist, anti-authoritarian, and modernist. Now, the collection, beyond (eds. Colin Bramwell with Gerda Stevenson (Shearsman Books, 2024)) gives readers a selection of poems written in English by Aonghas MacNeacail over the past 30 years. One of the implications of the book’s title is his deeply held wish to look ‘beyond’ division, not to anything transcendental (MacNeacail’s focus was always this world, not some other), but to the next term in an on-going dialectical process. One of the little gems from ‘the notebook’, included here, imagines a cup of knowledge, the liquor within, also knowledge, a grain is added and stirred, and the grain then consumes the liquor and continues to ‘grow, root, sprout / find elbows, crack the cup // find clay’.

MacNeacail’s modernism took its key lessons from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Olson, and Creeley and most of the poems here have that fluid, unpunctuated (hence pointed by the breath), often short lined, often indented formal shape we associate with the Black Mountain. He was a member of one of Phillip Hobsbaum’s fertile ‘groups’ (along with Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard) and the advice given was to go back to his roots, to ‘write about what you know’. In part, this took MacNeacail back to his childhood, growing up in Uig, on the Isle of Skye, speaking only Gaelic. It also made it clear what he wanted to escape from: Gerda Stevenson describes this as ‘the confines of the proscriptive Free Church of Scotland’. Several childhood poems, illustrate the stifling force of religion, on his mother, for example, ‘strapped down tightly / by a darkly warding book thick with orders that drove / and hedged her way’ (‘missing’). The church governed education too, the teacher little more than a ‘stern presence’, who demanded ‘psalms / from memory’ (‘crofter, not’).

The teacher’s ‘granite eye’ also features in ‘forbidden fruit’ where the contrast is between education’s confining ‘barbed-wire’ and the invitations of the natural world (of Skye), specifically the allure of ‘the biggest [. . .] sweetest’ nut hanging on a branch over a waterfall. The poem ‘had adam not eaten the apple’ feels like a later piece, with a more self-confident, liberated MacNeacail declaring ‘the thing is / not to always / spell the word correctly’ and imagining god’s demands for eternal perfection leading him to waken every morning, complaining ‘another fucking immaculate day’. A longer poem like ‘gaudy jane’ gives a sense of MacNeacail’s unshackling from restrictions. The figure addressed is part woman, part a realm of liberation, a window onto ‘wild excursions’, towards ‘dancing voices, laughing feet’, she is a glass of whisky, a doorway into nature, to sensuality, and a way to access the ‘little gods of mischief and delight’. Celebrations of the natural landscapes of Skye (and elsewhere) in fact become one of the characteristics of MacNeacail’s writing. Snowfall over hills is as if ‘god’s apron / settles on our field and makes / a tranquil bowl’ (‘snowhere’). In ‘a rainbow’, the natural phenomenon is enjoyed and admired, ‘so real // high up on that pentland slope’, its natural beauty preferred to any fanciful talk of pots of gold, its fleetingness an image of imagination and memory. MacNeacail’s ‘primula scottica at yesnaby’ celebrates the rare wildflower’s fragile beauty, its hardy nature, till it also becomes an image of Scotland itself: ‘the air it breathes is stiff with brine / this whit of life      still flowers / every tiny purple radiance is lambent / in the blood of time’. 

MacNeacail’s love of Nature is matched only by his writing on the varieties of human love, erotic, romantic, filial, parental, between friends. I can’t think of any other poet who’d compose 80 lines (both touching and hilarious) in praise of ‘some of my best friends’. A poem like ‘love in the moonlight’ is unashamedly romantic in its contrasting of the moon’s ‘pallor’ with the loved one’s ‘sun- / wrapped noons, bright mornings / and the way your evenings / dance into a fiery dusk’. There are several delicate poems featuring MacNeacail’s daughter, Galina, and – reminiscent of Courbet’s ‘The Origin of the World’ painting – ‘the curious eternal’ is a marvellous erotically-charged paean to a loved one, ‘after all those years / the mystery / of flesh, secretions, pulse and breathing patterns’. MacNeacail’s English poems exude a human warmth that, to judge from comments from friends and colleagues, was true to the man himself. They are driven by his wish to communicate – in whatever language, in truth – and his slipping free from Christianity’s ‘one book’, that would ‘consign all art and ingenuity / to black irrelevance’ (‘this land is your land’), allowed him to celebrate the flawed, the not perfectly straight, the interrupted conversations, that constitute being human with a passion and modesty. These lines from ‘the notebook’, are a characteristic, and invaluable, vade mecum: ‘no matter / how little / you say / it may / be worth / the saying, if it / touches the edge / of a shadow / that can / (possibly) / be thinned / by the breath / of words’.

Continuing Relevance of ‘Cargo of Limbs’

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I was recently tagged in a social media post by someone doing the Sealey Challenge – one poetry book a day for the month of August! I do admire people’s stamina. I was tagged because the book of the day for this person – and a mercifully short one at that – turned out to be my own chapbook, published by Hercules Editions back in 2019 under the title Cargo of Limbs. Originating in events almost 10 years ago now, it is utterly depressing that the longish poem that constitutes most of the book remains relevant. Now – as then – the news is full of people in small boats. Then, refugees and migrants were embarking in the Mediterranean. Now, most of the talk here is of people embarking from the coast of France to risk the real dangers of the English Channel. The book remains in print and can be bought from Hercules here or by contacting me directly.

I posted a short piece about the chapbook during the Covid lockdown in April 2020. I was preoccupied then with what writers can/cannot do in such dire circumstances as pandemics and wars: ‘Beyond feeling helpless, what do writers do in a crisis? I think of Shelley hearing news of the Manchester Massacre from his seclusion in Italy in 1822; Whitman’s close-up hospital journals and poems during the American Civil War; Edward Thomas hearing grass rustling on his helmet in the trenches near Ficheux; Ahkmatova’s painfully clear-sighted stoicism in Leningrad in the 1930s; MacNeice’s montage of “neither final nor balanced” thoughts in his Autumn Journal of 1938; Carolyn Forche witnessing events in 1970s El Salvador; Heaney’s re-location and reinvention of himself as “an inner émigré, grown long-haired / And thoughtful” in 1975; Brian Turner’s raw responses to his experience as a US soldier in Iraq in 2003′. You can read more of that piece – and hear me read the opening of the poem – here.

In the chapbook I wrote a ‘How I Wrote the Poem’ type of discussion and it’s that that I felt would be worth posting in full here because, though times have changed, nothing seems very different about the refugee crisis and the moral issues surrounding it . . .

It’s early in 2016 and I am on a train crossing southern England. On my headphones, Ian McKellen is reading Seamus Heaney’s just-published translation of Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. This is the book in which Aeneas journeys into the Underworld. As he descends, he encounters terror, war and violence before the house of the dead. He finds a tree filled with “[f]alse dreams”, then grotesque beasts, centaurs, gorgons, harpies. At the river Acheron, he sees crowds of people thronging towards a boat. These people are desperate to cross, yet the ferryman, Charon, only allows some to embark, rejecting others. At this point, in Heaney’s translation, Aeneas cries out to his Sibyl guide: “What does it mean [. . . ] / This push to the riverbank? What do these souls desire? / What decides that one group is held back, another / Rowed across the muddy waters?”

The timing is crucial. I’m listening to these powerful words in March 2016 and, rather than the banks of the Acheron and the spirits of the dead, they conjure up the distant Mediterranean coastline I’m seeing every day on my TV screen: desperate people fleeing their war-torn countries. The timing is crucial. It’s just six months since the terrible images of Alan Kurdi’s body – drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey – had filled the media. In the summer of 2015, this three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish origins and his family had fled the war engulfing Syria. They hoped to join relatives in the safety of Canada and were part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time. In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes of their planned flight across the Aegean, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.

Beyond my train window, the fields of England swept past; Virgil’s poem continued to evoke the journeys of refugees such as the Kurdi family. It struck me that some form of versioning of these ancient lines might be a way of addressing – as a poet – such difficult, contemporary events. I hoped they might offer a means of support as Tony Harrison has spoken of using rhyme and metre to negotiate, to pass through the “fire” of painful material. I also saw a further aspect to these dove-tailing elements that interested me: the power of the image. The death of Alan Kurdi made the headlines because photographs of his drowned body, washed up on the beach, had been taken. When Nilüfer Demir, a Turkish photographer for the Dogan News Agency, arrived on the beach that day, she said it was like a “children’s graveyard”. She took pictures of Alan’s lifeless body; a child’s body washed up along the shore, half in the sand and half in the water, his trainers still on his feet. Demir’s photographs, shared by Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch on social media, became world news.

Demir’s images were indeed shocking, breaking established, unspoken conventions about showing the bodies of dead children. I remember passionate online debates about the rights and wrongs of disseminating such images. Yet the power of the images, without doubt, contributed to a shift in opinion, marked to some degree by a shift in language as those people moving towards Europe came to be termed “refugees” more often than the othering word, “migrants”. This tension between the desire to draw attention to suffering and the risks of exploitation has arisen more recently. In June 2019, the hull of a rusty fishing boat arrived in Venice to form part of an installation at the Biennale by the artist, Christoph Buchel. The vessel had foundered off the Italian island of Lampedusa in April 2015 with 700 people aboard. They too were refugees seeking a better life. Only 28 people survived. When the Italian authorities recovered the vessel in 2016 there were 300 bodies still trapped inside. Buchel called his exhibit Barca Nostra (Our Boat) and there is little doubting his (and the Biennale organisers’) good intentions to raise public awareness of the continuing plight of refugees travelling across the Mediterranean. Yet Lorenzo Tondo, for example, has argued that Buchel’s exhibit diminishes, even exploits, the suffering of those who died, “losing any sense of political denunciation, transforming it into a piece [of art] in which provocation prevails over the goal of sensitising the viewer’s mind” (The Observer, 12.05.19).

Interestingly, in Book 6, Virgil asks the Gods to strengthen his resolve to report back the horrifying truths he’s about to witness and I came to realise that the narrative voice in my new version ought to be the voice of a witnessing photojournalist. It is this narrator who accompanies my Aeneas (renamed Andras) through a more contemporary ‘underworld’. I imagine Andras also as a journalist, though he is a man of words rather than images. At some distance now from the writing of the poem, I see that the two western journalists have differing reactions to what they encounter. The photographer holds firm to recording events with a distanced objectivity. He considers it his role, his duty, to deliver such truths (perhaps as Nilüfer Demir felt on the beach at Bodrum; perhaps as Amel El Zakout felt on her own harrowing journey from Istanbul in 2015, the extraordinary images of which accompany this poem). My photographer’s partner, Andras, has a lot less poem-time, yet – following the outline of Virgil’s poem closely – he has a more emotional, empathetic response. By turns, he is fearful and compassionate. I think he has more moral scruple. As well as presenting the plight of contemporary refugees, between them I hope they are also debating, in part, the role of any artist impelled to bear witness to the suffering of others.

So Virgil’s original lines provided guidance but I have changed some things. As I have said, early on he apostrophises the Gods, asking for assistance in accurately reporting his journey to the Underworld. I saw no justification for my own narrator to be appealing to divine powers, though he understands those people fleeing might well put their trust in their own God. So it’s with tongue in cheek that he asks to be allowed to “file” his work in a way that is accurate (“what / happens is what’s true”) and these lines become his moment to make his faith in objectivity clear: “let me file // untroubled as I’m able”. The “brother” he alludes to is one-time journalist, Ernest Hemingway, who would often risk gunfire to file his despatches in Madrid, during the Spanish Civil War.

Later, Virgil describes the journey of Aeneas and the Sibyl through an ill-lit landscape, drained of colour, approaching the jaws of Hell. All around are personifications of Grief, Care, Disease, Old Age, Fear, Hunger, War and Death itself (Heaney’s translation buries these personifications to a large degree; in general, I prefer Allen Mandelbaum’s 1961 translation). I wanted to retain the device of personification but shifted the physical contexts of the actions to evoke the kind of experiences refugees are still fleeing from: bombing, persecution, the use of chemical weapons (“yellow dust of poison breeze running // into the trunks of trees” – an image I have borrowed from Choman Hardi’s fine poem ‘Gas Attack’). Aeneas then discovers “a giant shaded elm” (tr. Mandelbaum). Heaney’s translation associates this with “False dreams”; Mandelbaum has “empty Dreams”. All around the tree are grotesque beasts (centaurs, gorgons, harpies) which frighten Aeneas and he draws his sword against them. In my version, the tree of false dreams becomes an image of the often vain hopes that drive people to flee their homes, while Virgil’s menagerie of beasts suggest the kinds of distortions, the physical and mental lengths to which such people are driven and the dangers they face in such extremities: “bestialised women // girls groomed to new shape”. It’s here my Andras reveals his more volatile emotional nature in fearing what he sees, thinking these figures may be a threat to him. In the original, it is the Sibyl who calms Aeneas; in my version it is the less emotionally engaged narrator/photojournalist who lends Andras the defence of more emotional “distance”.

Virgil’s Aeneas begins to descend towards the River Acheron and the “squalid ferryman”, Charon. The landscape of my version is a portrait of routes overland to the sea’s edge and my figure of Charon, “the guardian of the crossing”, becomes an inscrutable and unscrupulous people smuggler. Virgil makes it clear he is aged, “but old age in a god is tough and green”. I took this hint of ambiguity further in terms of Charon’s eyes, his outstretched hand, even his physical appearance and presence: “young and attentive / yet from the choppy tide / he’s older gazing / a while then—ah— // gone—”. Virgil describes the “multitude” rushing eagerly to Charon’s boat and makes use of two epic similes comparing the human figures to falling autumn leaves and flocks of migrating birds. I’ve kept the ghosts of these images and extended the people’s approach to the ferryman as an opportunity to describe the kinds of perilous vessels that since 2015 have been launched into the Mediterranean: “they long to stagger // into the dinghy’s wet mouth / the oil-stinking holds / where shuttered waters / pool”. Virgil’s Charon permits some to board but bars others. As Book 6 proceeds, it is made clear those who are rejected are the dead who remain as yet unburied. In my version, the people smuggler also retains the power to choose who travels, but his reasons for doing so are not clear (probably money, possibly caprice). The irony is that in not permitting some to embark he may also be saving lives.

In Virgil’s poem, before he hears the full explanation of Charon’s selection process, Aeneas is baffled and deeply moved by it. He cries out – this time in Mandelbaum’s translation – for an explanation to the guiding Sibyl: “by what rule / must some keep off the bank while others sweep / the blue-black waters with their oars?” I wanted my Andras to be equally moved by their plight and the seeming injustice. But the question he tries to articulate is directed not merely at those who make a living from such dangerous journeys but also (I hope) to those in more official, political, public capacities – those who represent us – who also possess the power to accept or deny entry to people fleeing for their lives. There is no Virgilian equivalent to my final five lines but I wanted to accentuate the growing disparity between the ways the two western journalists are responding to what they witness. The narrator still wants to take good images. But Andras is moved enough to see the need for less distance, to dash the camera to the ground, to engage with those who are fleeing, to try to help.

Laurel Prize Shortlist 2025 – My Favourite Is….!

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The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order):

Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)
JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts
Eliza O’Toole A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books)
Katrina Porteous Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Carol Watts Mimic Pond (Shearsman Books)

It turns out I have reviewed two of these collections – one of them I have been bending the ears of anyone who will listen about how very very good it is. I reviewed Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books) for Poetry Salzberg Review fairly recently and posted an extended version of the review here. I concluded that ‘The people and landscapes of ‘Carboniferous’ are far more successful as poems to be read and enjoyed, while ‘Invisible Everywhere’ is a bold, well-intentioned experiment that fails’.

It is Eliza O’Toole’s A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books) that I have been telling everybody about. Interestingly – and demonstrating the great enthusiasm the publisher shares for this poet – Shearsman have just published her NEXT collection: Buying the Farm (a georgics of sorts). The nominated collection was published in 2024.

I reviewed it in brief for The Times Literary Supplement recently, as follows:

The premise of Eliza O’Toole’s superb debut collection, A Cranic of Ordinaries, is unpromising: a year’s cycle of diaristic pieces in which the poet walks her dog through the Stour valley. But the result is a sublime form of ecopoetry which is visionary, yet creaturely and incarnate, and to achieve this O’Toole channels two great nineteenth century writers. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ joys in the things of Nature which are always ‘here and but the beholder / Wanting’. When self and natural world do communicate, Hopkins named that flash of true relationship ‘instress’.  O’Toole’s ‘Stour Owls’ records just such a moment, listening to the calls of a female tawny owl, the ‘slight pin-thin / hoot’ of the male, followed by a tense silence: ‘then the low slow of the barn owl as the / white slide of her glide brushes the air we / both hold & then breathe’ (12).

O’Toole also adopts Emerson’s idea of the ‘transparent eyeball’, seeing all, yet being itself ‘nothing’. The excision of the self’s perspective is systematically pursued. Seldom is the landscape ‘seen’ but is rather subject to plain statement: ‘It was a machine-gun of a morning’ (11), ‘a vixen-piss of a morning’ (13), ‘a muck spread of a morning’ (34). O’Toole has an extraordinarily observant eye, but this repeated trope counters any taint of the constructed picturesque, the human-centring of vanishing points and perspective. The observer grows ‘part or parcel’ of the world. Such a vision makes demands on language because in truth, ‘It is necessary / to write what cannot be written’ (94), and this yields one of the most exciting aspects of this collection as the poet deploys varieties of plain-speaking, scientific, ancient, and esoteric vocabularies as well as a Hopkinsesque ‘unruly syntax’. She describes ‘young buds. Just starting from / the line of life, phloem sap climbing, / a shoot apical meristem and post / zygotic. It was bud-set’ (26).

O’Toole’s choices about form are also bold, almost all the poems being both right and left justified, creating blocks (windows?) opening on each page. The realm the reader is invited into (not told about, not shown) is one where the manifold particularities of the natural world are also and at once a whole. O’Toole’s dog digs a hole: ‘In / the hole and out of it, the soil was / whole. There was a unity and no lack. / In the hole was soil. It was a / comprehensive various entirety; it / was a universe of relatings’. (38) In such ways O’Toole’s ordinaries are made ‘strange’ (33) and the toxic divide between modern humanity and the natural is momentarily, repeatedly, bridged.

Here’s one of the poems from A Cranic of Ordinaries. Apologies are due for formatting accuracy as – as we all know – WordPress is rubbish at dealing with poetry. But you’ll get the idea…..

Perpetual gravity – Box Tombs at Wiston

(the quality of appearing to recede, essential to the landscape tradition)

Now illegible, the children of John

Whitmore and Susanna his wife,

Sarah aged 11 Months,

Robert aged 2 Years,

Rebeckah aged 11 Months,

Elizabeth aged …. Weeks,

Lucy aged 1 Week,

Susanna aged 20 Years,

Thomas Aged 6 Years.

John Whitmore departed this life Jany

the ….6th 1746 Aged (6)6. He was a

good husband loving father faithful

friend and a Good Christian. Susanna

Whitmore died / Jany. 25 1789 Aged

(?8)6. To dwell until all the world

inscribed when it was still possible to

die. To lie slightly foxed, mortared in

a brick box irregularly repaired, alive

with stone-devouring lichen and

littered with dry lime, leaves and

frass. Fin* pees antimony and sees off

the squirrel, wards off unbelievers we

have no need for having no place

amongst toppling tombs. A litany

indescribable, a conjugation beyond

reach, an accent mark over a vowel,

an entire landscape made grave. It

was October, the same fields were

ditched, furrowed, carved, still dug

over and still the Stour was flowing. In

the picture’s distant plain, the sun

like other yellows, was still fading.

Generally, a history remains unsure.

*O’Toole’s dog

The Laurel Prize awards £5,000 for the winner of the prize and £1,000 for the other four finalists – so congratulations are due to all of them. The winner will be announced at the Laurel Prize Ceremony which is taking place on Friday 19 September at 5.30pm (BST), and will be aired via a free live-stream. This year’s ceremony is a part of BBC Contains Strong Language which takes place in Bradford from 18-21 September.