Welcome to the website of Martyn Crucefix, now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive. Please use the menu bar above to check out further information about Martyn’s activities as poet, translator, and reviewer, as well as his blog which has been praised as “unblinking and packed with high quality material, especially his razor-sharp reviews and [. . .] unexpected perspectives on big names”. (Matthew Stewart, Rogue Strands).

Most recent original publication: Walking Away is a 25 page chapbook published by Dare-Gale Press in autumn 2025. The collection consists of just four poems – the central, title piece being a longer sequence of modern haiku – in which the poet bids farewell to his mother and father with a heart-breaking tenderness and a cooler eye of observation that pulls no punches. Drawing on the vivid, condensed power of the haiku form, these poems movingly evoke the sadness, the absurdity, even the bitter comedy of the processes of ageing, mortality, and loss. Philip Gross has fulsomely praised Walking Away: ‘These are despatches from a fond but fearful place – so close to the depths of loved-ones’ old age that we find ourselves dissolving into their world of lost connections, among fragments of sensation and familiar detail, a world almost without time. The spaces between lines and sections in the central sequence are as eloquent as words. Sharply observant of himself as well what’s around him, Martyn Crucefix is an acute but tactful guide to somewhere most of us, at any age, are loath to go’

Most recent translation published: Martyn’s new, major – 200 page – selection and translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry from 1899 through to 1926 (Pushkin Press), much praised by Victoria Moul here (The Friday Poem): ‘I wished there were more of this wonderful book. Whether you know and love Rilke already, or are new to him, do get hold of a copy!’

Published in 2023: Martyn’s most recent full collection of poems, Between a Drowning Man, was published by Salt in 2023. Listen to Martyn talking about the background and the writing of the poems in this new book in these two podcasts: Planet Poetry – about the whole collection and A Mouthful of Air – focusing on the single poem, ‘you are not in search of’ (page 57) Read reviews of this new collection here – by Mat Riches on The High Window; by Stuart Henson on London Grip; by Ian Brinton for Litter Magazine; by Carl Tomlinson for The Friday Poem.

Listen to Martyn talking more generally about his own work here, in a recent Poetry Worth Listening To interview:

Prose translation also published in 2023, Martyn’s translation of selected essays by German poet and novelist, Buchner Prize winner, Lutz Seiler. Titled In Case of Loss, the book is published by And Other Stories and gathers the best of Seiler’s non-fiction from the last twenty-five years, revealing his essays to be different to, but on a par with, his much-praised fiction and poetry. Seiler’s beautifully anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background in the GDR.

Seasonal News: Martyn appears in one of the Candlestick Press Christmas chapbooks (‘Instead of a card’ is their slogan) – find that here. Also, in 2023, Martyn and Michael Glover edited a brand new anthology of Christmas poems ancient and modern. It’s still available and contains new work by stars of the contemporary poetry scene including Nancy Campbell, Rishi Dastidar, Penny Shuttle, Marvin Thompson, Alison Brackenbury, Denise Saul, John Greening, Jeremy Hooker. There are also poems by Wendy Cope, Kevin Crossley-Holland and Rowan Williams sitting alongside older – known and less familiar – pieces by Yeats, Lawrence, Herbert, Donne, Hardy, Hopkins, Tennyson and others.

Forthcoming in 2026: Muscaliet Press will publish Dream of Glass, a chapbook of Martyn’s translations of the little-known French/Corsican poet, Angèle Paoli

Martyn’s translations from the German, These Numbered Days, poems by Peter Huchel (Shearsman Books, 2019), won the Society of Authors’ Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize 2020.  On behalf of the judges, Steffan Davies said:  ‘This is an absolutely superb translation of Huchel’s poems: a clear, outstanding winner even among such strong competition. It reads as poetry throughout, never ‘feeling translated’ and yet always also an accurate capturing of Huchel’s German. The poems are beautiful, economical poetry in themselves. This is translation at its very best: deep, sympathetic comprehension, inspired creativity, confident composition, fine judgement. Congratulations to a very deserving winner.’

Martyn’s other publications include: Cargo of Limbs was published by Hercules Editions, 2019: poems by Martyn Crucefix; images by Amel Alzakout; essay by Choman Hardi. Read Ian Brinton’s review here. Martyn’s previous full collection of poetry is The Lovely Disciplines (Seren Books, 2017). Details and reviews can be found here.  An interview with Martyn was featured in South Bank Poetry. Listen to Martyn read three poems on the Poetic Voices website.

Also: Guillemot Press published O. at the Edge of the Gorge, with images by Phyllida Bluemel. This fourteen-poem crown of sonnets is filled with the landscape and natural history of the Marche of east Italy”. This chapbook (now sold out) was reviewed by Helena Nelson here. Also, in very limited edition from Sam Riviere’s If a Leaf Falls Press, a short abecedary sequence,  A Convoy. For another major interview with Martyn (from 2015) covering topics such as getting into poetry, traditional prosody, a discussion of narrative and confessional poetry, the processes of translation and work in development: click here.