John Greening has recently reviewed my new chapbook of poems, Walking Away (Dare-Gale Press, 2025), a review which first appeared on The High Window website. Many thanks to David Cooke at THW and to the reviewer for his kind and perceptive comments about a set of poems for which I feel (an obvious) affection. Mum and Dad would be bemused by it all I think, but pleased to be so remembered.
Martyn Crucefix has come a long way since his remarkable Enitharmon debut, Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990). Learning, no doubt, from poetry he has since translated or adapted – notably Rilke, but also Peter Huchel, Rosalía de Castro and the Daodejing (more familiar as the Tao te Ching) – he has become more and more experimental, more complicatedly troubled. This was especially evident in his 2017 sequence A Convoy and in the beautifully illustrated Cargo of Limbs from Hercules Editions (2019), itself a version of Book Six of the Aeneid.
Walking Away is more straightforward and in some ways a shift towards a major key, though the subject matter might make it appear otherwise. Even the tranquil landscape on the cover reminds us that Crucefix has always had a pastoral streak: he was, after all, brought up in the West Country, which features here a good deal, if elegiacally. The book is dedicated to his parents and it opens with a ‘Video Call’ full of tragi-comic touches (the camera is ‘angled so I catch only the crowns // of grey heads then a giant hand/reaches forward to re-adjust’) and ends with gracefully formal stanzas evoking a ‘provincial market town’ (Trowbridge, perhaps, near the Wiltshire village where Crucefix grew up?).
Fourteen of the pamphlet’s pages are occupied by the remarkable title sequence of four-line poems (drawing on ‘the vivid, condensed power of the haiku form’, as the blurb puts it, but each of a different syllable count) about the decline of the poet’s elderly mother, whose state is addressed more directly in the penultimate poem of the four in Walking Away: ‘My Mother’s Care-home Room (as Cleopatra’s Monument)’. She is portrayed unsparingly with ‘an Easter Island profile / gaunt and beaked’ but becomes a regal presence by the poem’s end as her son keeps his vigil with a final flourish of rhyme:
with all the helpless-
ness of a Charmian
at the cooling feet
of her brave Queen
the asp flung down
beneath the only chair
there has ever been
The title sequence, however, is the book’s great success, a brilliant series of vignettes, like theatre music without the play, set largely, it seems, during a period when the poet’s mother was in her own home. Some of these don’t feel like haiku, but others have that unmistakable, indefinable quality – perhaps to do with awareness of the seasons:
Turning in at your mother’s front gate
Eighty years at a stroke
Swifts no longer nesting
Crucefix knows how to find the Imagistic essence of a situation, as the form demands; and his gift for metaphor has always been considerable:
This week’s new dosette box
Grey windows not yet broken
Twenty-eight channels nothing on
Once you work out what a ‘dosette box’ is (one of those compartmentalized containers for daily tablets), the image here is potent and at least as good as ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’. For their full effect, these fragments do need each other, and they don’t often need such glossing. Take the next one, only the third in the sequence:
Telephone numerals are big and bold
The size of Scrabble pieces
A language you once knew
The brevity is fitting, since that’s often the way one communicates with those in decline; there is tea, a shared remark, more tea, a view of a lawn, knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, a car passing, a nap, a scratching mouse, ‘The clamour of carers / A microwave ping’. And while nothing connects with nothing, we are embraced by an intense emotion and a sense of an approaching end. Walking Away demands to be read.
Martyn Crucefix 