brief poetry review

Another Look at Odysseus #5

martyn crucefix blogging, brief poetry review, Classical poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, translation, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is the fifth – and final – instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. The second 3 poems can be read here. The third 3 poems can be read here. The fourth 3 poems can be read here. In these concluding 3 poems, Odysseus catches sight – on the street – of a woman he used to love, who left him, who hurt him. Telemachus’s own erotic encounters with women never come to anything, yielding for him only further frustration and unanswerable questions. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Teiresias tells Odysseus, after he has killed the suitors, to continue on his travels, but this time to head inland, carrying an oar, in search of a people who know nothing of the sea.

from Essays in Island Logic

‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’

he considers the longevity of love

beside the plash of blue fountains

fronting the Paradise Hotel

x

the shade-end of Flamboyant Street

he glimpses

x

her unfashionable blonde

medium-cut not prison-razored or wrapped

x

not seen folded

to the clipped déshabillé the younger girls

begin to favour these days—

x

her body thickened

more severe in the black business suit

x

but the long swing of the left hand hers

pale strands

on the nape of the neck hers

x

hers that bold

address to the world’s sunny littoral

x

to the sunlit corner

beyond the blue of tumbling water

where now he is able to own the hurt—

x

no finer test

nor anything less than what his old self

would put to the sword

x

no more than the heart’s bloody rent

she made of him

x

the gaping wound surviving still

restless in its stony bed

x

man’s glittering and impassive ocean

to woman’s cold moon

x

his son finds himself looking at the moon

obscured by the flashing Bar Promo sign

the crescent moon

x

the night they met

x

the boy then with no thought of light

only gravity

her beauty as it drew him

x

across the dull universe of Tuesday night

the Place of Our Sacred Lady—

x

her glance across the tables

full of milky

outspokenness the whites of her eyes

x

the glossy black reserve in her pupil

those pale perfect breasts

his goal

x

in the ease of which he would find time

to reflect

on the nature the allure of such goals—

x

until the following Sunday evening

when they have outstripped

a whole series of unremarkable love songs

x

once more he walks

far out beyond the marina lights

x

once more to wrestle

with whether it’s the moon must envy

his agitation and immobility

x

or whether

it is he who must envy the moon’s

serenity

x

and slow movement

x

he fails to grasp good advice

what passes for gods have not finished

with him yet

x

says one in the bar

who had things gone better

should by rights have been forgotten—

x

when you think you are done

there is still further to go

with something across your shoulder

x

you are not sure is not a gun

because you find yourself

x

travelling amongst people

who know nothing of the sea

x

who eat no salt

who have not seen a ship’s purple sails

nor the long oars that drive them—

x

they ask

what is this something-something

across your shoulder

x

suggesting you lay it down

lay it right here

that you perform what rituals you recall

x

then perhaps if things had gone better

had this love

this hurt even the bright wind’s shifting

x

this dream this joy

at the glittering brink of sight

where the sea-rise sways

x

to bring in another

this next of catches

from the salt’s sharp throat

Another Look at Odysseus #4

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, Classical poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, translation, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is the fourth instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. The second 3 poems can be read here. The third 3 poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Penelope tries to work out her understanding of the black, volcanic fields which lie high up at the centre of the island of Ithaca, but she feels the limitations of the life she has been expected to live make this impossible. Odysseus is wrestling with the facts of change and suffering. He thinks of his dog, Argos (who features a good deal in Nolan’s film), not merely their recognising each other, but their being capable of loving the apparently unlovable. Later, Penelope, knowing she is ill, drives up into the Ithacan hills in search of a shaman, in search of a cure.

from Essays in Island Logic

‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’

his wife remembers the High Centre

in the Crater Zone

curves like highways giant magma slicks

the cone’s last eruption

x

earth’s seismic sneezing

x

black peppercorns the size of footballs

the shape of human heads

x

the size of black refuse sacks

big as overturned cars—

x

the last thing old men remember

that there were years before this darkness

x

this turning inside-out

x

these older oxidised rust-red levels

that begin to wrap themselves

x

in pine and stonecrop

the age for which all subsequent ages

pay unwilling price—

x

yet what she saw was more like eternity

grown short-lived

and what she witnessed

x

everything getting ready to dissolve

where old men cry out

watch that mountain watch that mountain

x

the bravado

of youngsters sneering and shrugging up

fuck this shaking my fucking feet

x

her understanding how this must be

and that she can lay claim to neither

x

having waited too long

x

he considers what the young have to teach

to stand up invisible

as a forked child squalls in the whip

and withdrawal of waves

x

black sand thrown at shins and toes

sensing

the slither of ground beneath

x

and surely love this thrill of it

knifing him ecstatic

x

establishing its open wound

x

its soul-shaping progress the young know

yet unaware of—

x

trying to re-learn this

in part the effort not to flinch

x

as the dog he trained when young

coursing wild goat and deer and hare

x

like its master

no quarry able to slip away—

x

yet when he returned

almost unrecognisably changed infested

with ticks

x

half-dead from twenty years of neglect

an old rug

lay in the agave shade

x

dog and master thumping in recognition

x

barely able to drag themselves together

each as unpalatable

no finer test

x

the unlovable other

x

his wife drives herself there and back

only in the High Centre could the shaman

be uncovered

his reputation for re-building those

x

who ascend through the pine belts

women particularly

pick across the lava fields

x

put themselves in his hands

feeling disappointed or depressed

x

bringing their clicked back

or cracked heart—

x

she brings a lump in her right breast

he will spirit

to the basalt from which it was born

x

in its place

locates a piece of red coral

thought to transpose itself to human flesh

x

at his whirling prayer

though it must continue to ache

x

like a pulled tooth

to the probing helplessness of her tongue—

x

winding from the brutal fields

she tries the descent

crossing the long shadows of pine trees

x

enlivened by the hope of lying

precious again slowly

x

under a husband’s kiss that will be ready

to touch and test and find

x

her out again

Another Look at Odysseus #2

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, Classical poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, translation, writing , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is the second instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. The first 3 poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Odysseus considers Ithaca’s rise to fame – or notoriety – as a tourist destination, mirroring the decline in the kind of values to which he once aspired. The decommissioning of a lighthouse on the island reflects this – as does the plight of the now unemployed keeper of the lighthouse. Father and son often argue: Telemachus’ angry, cynical, frustrated searching for ‘definition’, versus his ageing father’s long-gestating, baffling, acceptance of ‘what is’.

from Essays in Island Logic

‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’

he considers the process of history

from his eyrie starting

awake to the increasing white cliffs

of tourist palaces

x

their long blue necklaces of pools

lessons in history in his morning glimpse

of black-rock coastline dragging itself

x

from the glittering ocean off-comers

come for—

x

a graph line of island population

first registering in rock-pool shallows

x

gathering to a barely visible invasion

of black-grit beaches

x

sudden

vertical lurching up the volcanic cliff-face

x

from which all the insular myths

have flowed—

x

the heroic defence of a once-chosen race

proud statues

of outstanding individualists

x

a glorious empire of ruins

and footholds explosive progress of suitors

and singles

x

sharks and shysters

piling their millions into breezeblock

apartments

x

lamps and leatherwear

cheques and beer and bermudas dropped

x

at twinkling nightfall

finding their way to washed-up dawn

x

he considers improvements on the island

hand-in-glove with mainland government

they automatise

x

the lighthouse

that has long set its foot

in basalt veins under Black Point

x

convert the lighthouse-keeper’s rooms

to holiday lets

as if we did not have enough

x

till the last keeper

is drunk all day on the marina wall

x

has visions

grows full of omens

x

the squabbling children

pelt him with crab shells and fish ends—

x

loitering for hours after nightfall

his quiet staring

into the rhythm of his usurped home

x

its appointment

flawless now the machinery pulses

and the human plays dumb—

x

as dough-bodied hermits

revert to submergence and silence

as he is driven

x

to and fro by the tide

striking out for borrowed shells

x

every gesture becoming more imprecise

every gesture

becoming obscured by the night

x

the ghostly

tongue-tied disenfranchised soul

x

his son rehearses one of their many arguments

x

petals! explodes the angry young man

stammering oath on oath

x

at what his own feet trample on

scarcely glorified seabed

x

nothing more than rock and sand

in the cold deeps

x

where light does not come

where life

is an afterthought if it’s anything at all—

x

such noisy convictions

that even earth’s imprisoned and incapable

it cannot choose

x

but rather balloons out at random

rupture! he cries

about which old men know fucking plenty!

x

innards extruded molten rock

earth of course in search of definition

gas and fire

x

mixed with the freeze of water

is all—

x

over and over this same mistake

this same spill spew going solid to pile

a homeland

x

its unforgiving soil

this scurf of life that sprawls across it

x

says his father

I know what you say but try to explain

x

purple petals

on my doorstep all summer long

Another Look at Odysseus #1

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, Classical poetry, contemporary British poetry, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, translation, writing , , , , , , ,

This is the first instalment of groups of 3 poems selected from my 2010 sequence of poems which takes Homer’s The Odyssey as its starting point. The full sequence of 22 poems first appeared in Hurt (Enitharmon Press). I have written about the development of the sequence in an earlier blog post here. In these 3 poems, Odysseus, now an old man, walks the Ithacan landscape in search of an old grave stele he recalls as presenting an heroic image of a young fighting man, only to find the passage of time has changed his view of it. Meanwhile, Telemachus is still searching for opportunities to prove his own idealistic, militaristic, heroism in service to a clear-cut purpose (that he has yet to discover). Penelope dreams (again) of her own childhood, her husband appearing suddenly as an eagle, intent on marrying her, changing her life forever.

from Essays in Island Logic

‘Same sea, same dangers waiting for him / As though he had got nowhere but older’ – W.S. Merwin – ‘Odysseus’

he considers the passage of time

old man walking retirement

x

up the hillside below the pine belts

past centuries-old spilled

x

sarcophagi looking

to recover one particular grave stele—

this

x

sure as he can be

this one under a triangular pediment

the young man leaning back in bas relief

x

such a contemporary slouch

legs crossed at the ankles hips thrust out

in contemplation

x

a warrior’s helmet held at arm’s length

its long plume

x

like a lion’s tail

seeming about to respond to his ambitious

x

nature his searching

out the end of all complexity—

x

he sees now the boy’s had his forehead

chipped off

the kid is brainless and beautiful

x

about second century BC

marking the grave of a dead warrior

x

an old man all but forgotten

after dusk

x

walking retirement down the dark hillside

bringing it to the surf’s edge now

x

like a child

x

his son wakes and wanders round the house

stirring in the small of night

x

the boy raises himself to a gluey throat

fattened lips

x

feels his way

downstairs to the unlit kitchen

x

to be surprised by the winking of lights

like campfire signs

wasteful stand-bys burning

x

on the distant hillsides

of radio microwave fridge and oven—

x

leans into polished taps

knocks back glass after re-hydrating glass

x

dregs of last night’s beer

incline him to hear the muttering of troops

x

on the dark flanks of hills

x

the clank of billies scouring of blade edges

a vastness of purpose

drawing up the life he never possessed—

x

knows he would have been astute

clear-headed then

consulted through the terrific nights

x

by faithful generals

who’d hymn his black ferocity

x

his desire for the acid tests of dawn

that will never come

but the obscurities of blame

x

upstairs his father singing in his sheets

dull as new-born

x

his wife is restless in her sleep

a girl once again shepherding the flock

of twenty geese

x

like pets she lords it over them

a pack of baying dogs

x

showing pale against dark volcanic soil

waddling from the round pond

x

on her father’s farm

crowding to eat the grain she lends them

x

till eagle cruelty with steely talons

sweeps out of a sky

apparently twenty years deep—

x

feathers

explosive as when white cherry blossom

is ripped by the wind

x

a blur of wing white/black failing

x

she screams wrestling to beat

the bird off in vain

her flock a shredded bloodied mattress—

x

imperious eagle on the rooftree

x

tilting its eye to ocean distance

into blue ocean

it’s me your husband come to set you free

x

her sphere of influence diminished

twenty-fold

x

but continues to be grateful

touching heaviness in her right breast

cannot recall

x

how many times she has dreamed this

Another Look at Odysseus (after seeing Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’)

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, political poetry, translation, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Watching Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey on the IMAX screen at Swiss Cottage recently reminded me of this …. Back in 2008, I was struggling to complete a sequence of poems – called ‘Essays in Island Logic’ – in which I had taken the three central figures of Homer’s The Odyssey and placed them on a modern Ithaca, by now become a popular holiday destination. On reflection, I realised I was struggling with the poems because I was labouring under a strong a desire to exert too much authorial control over a piece that in fact wanted to be set free. What follows derives from notes I made at the time, having discovered some of Boris Pasternak’s ideas about the writing of poetry which influenced my approach to the poem sequence which was completed and eventually published in my collection Hurt (Enitharmon, 2010).

Over the next couple two weeks, I will publish here 15 poems from the sequence that resulted – featuring an ageing Odysseus, a frustrated and ill Penelope, and their son, the angry, unfulfilled, edgy Telemachus.

There is an early – now lost – paper by Boris Pasternak called ‘Symbolism and Immortality’ which argues that our impressions are subjective. However, he also argues that these subjective impressions are capable of being ‘the common property of man’. Pasternak is recalling this lost essay in his ‘Essay in Autobiography’ written in 1956 and he goes on, ‘I assumed that every human being leaves behind him when he dies his own share of this undying, racial subjectivity – the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul, art finds its . . . field of action and its main content’. He then remembers concluding that ‘the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience’ (tr. Manya Harari, Poems 1955-1959 and The Essay in Autobiography, Collins Harvill, 1990).

In Pasternak’s own work these ideas emerge in poetic form in moments such as ‘I want the heart of the matter / Always in work, / The chaos of feelings’ (‘I want the heart of the matter’) and ‘Success is not your aim / Nor noise, but gift of self’ (‘Fame’s not a pretty sight’). In struggling to complete ‘Essays in Island Logic’ I felt I had been blocked because I have been too anxious to ascertain, or assert, its meaning. Returning to the sequence again after a few months I felt more sanguine about this – chilled and allowing. As Pasternak is saying, all my work argues my own matrix of experience – it’s not me but mine. The objective world (though unknowable still) is processed through my own particular mesh – my set of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, almost texturised, according to my personal self. As Pasternak argues though, each individual self has sufficient in common with all mankind so that only the extremely eccentric individual will be unrecognisable to anybody else. Hence experiences are both unique and common. If this was not the case, then art would be either excruciatingly dull or utterly alien to us.

It strikes me this is not far from Keats’ valley of pain. We begin with the fundamental matrix of any human being – a body, drives, senses, loneliness, seeking love and companionship – and this is grown on through the hornbook of our individual experiences, becoming, as Keats says, more unique the more we experience. These days I feel the truth of this more and try to understand it far less – the accumulated complexity and richness of even my relatively narrow life. This is the root of my railing against fundamentalism (of any kind): that it denies access to mature experience. It short cuts the truth – at least the only one we can get to. It may seem attractive at times (of trouble) but it is always an error. Odysseus learns this I think in the ‘Essays’ sequence since his earlier self was a fundamentalist soldier (almost tautologous – the perceiver of vivid contrast of necessity, us and them, victory and defeat). His previous egotism, eloquence and persuasiveness suggest this. In the past he has always employed language as persuasion, and I remember how Auden became so wary of the persuasive powers of language around 1939. In my poem, the aging Odysseus no longer wishes to divide and persuade but rather to take life as a whole.

In contrast, his son, Telemachus, remains locked into his search for a form of fundamentalism – what he regards as a cause, a purpose. He has yet to (may never) grow into the more complex jacket that he needs to wear. Poor Penelope has led the restricted life of a conventional woman (her tending the geese as a child, her long waiting, her role in the house etc) and she quietly envies male mobility and their encounters with the world. I have not been radical with her portrayal – yet she too is best seen as seeking the complexity of truth. So there are three souls in the poem sequence, all variously encountering the world. The tourists are equally in search of a rather simplistic remedy to their lives elsewhere: vainly seeking in the wrong places, the beach, consumerism, sex, geographical escape. The solution – if we can speak in such terms – is an openness of soul. There: I’ve said it. This is the first occasion on which it does not feel pompous or laughable for me to talk in such terms. It is the goal of the wholeness of our awareness that suggests the holiness of self.

So we process our own experience. We find a locale, a niche for it within ourselves, thus adding it to ourselves, to our growing uniqueness. As a teacher, this has long been my model of the educative process and ought to find its way more often from my daily business into poems. And death? As Pasternak suggests, the artist leaves behind something of their own ‘take’ on their life experience – a poem, a piece of music, a painting. Did M——– leave something when she died in January 2006? (or more recently, rawly, tragically, K——– in April 2026?)  Of course – her words, her way of life, her perception of things such as food, children, gardens, her husband. She contributed and still contributes to our ongoing life and thought processes. She remains one of the counterpoint of voices, part of the collaborative nature of life, incorporated (though bodiless) into our matrix, into our souls. Of course, we are aware of blind-spots in her individual perception of the world – these are part of her individual nature, her character. But this merely suggests that it is the most powerful personalities who are capable of incorporating most. Shakespeare – oh, Bill! – and Keats’ concept of negative capability. Then the driving force behind this emergence from the shell of the self into the world is surely what we call ‘love’. We are all artists of differing abilities in our everyday lives. What marks the ‘real’ artists? Surely only the choice of medium as a particular, recognisable form of expression. I have always been drawn to Virginia Woolf’s idea of the dinner-party as an art form as in Mrs Dalloway – perfectly valid, but seldom recognised. And my beef with work, the grind of the 9-to-5, is the way it demands and delivers the narrowing of experience. So my ‘Essays’ is a meaningless sequence – merely three souls engaged, at differing stages, on the common work of the creation of their own selves.

And so, more generally, to write a poem? It is the slow uncovering of these forged connections in our own minds. This is why it happens. It begins, unbidden, so often. But the process of recovery itself, with the intention of bringing it into the public sphere, so that it can be taken up and experienced by others, that is a process towards self-knowledge and is never (should never be) a representation of the already familiarly known, the preconceived. Writing a poem resembles the process of self-justification – but is not that. It is a process of analysis, discovery, comprehension of the negotiated ground between self and other. In Dr Zhivago, Pasternak attacks two types of journalists. The first has a pre-prepared construct, an agenda about the ‘people’ and, claiming to be an observer, in reality only collects supporting evidence of his own views. The second (and more recognisably modern type), is all clipped speech, sketches, and scenes of reality, scepticism and misanthropy. But Pasternak argues again: facts do not truly exist for us until man puts into them something of his own, some measure of his own wilful, human genius, of fairy tale and myth. As before, this seeming rampant individualism is counter-balanced by Pasternak’s unshakable belief that – for the most part (and I’m afraid it is this vague) – there does remain a sufficient commonality for art to speak.

Review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy’ (2025)

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This review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound’ – a chapbook which gives us the first sighting of Harsent’s versions of C.P. Cavafy – published in 2025 by Dare-Gale Press, was originally published in Acumen magazine. It was commissioned by reviews’ editor, Andrew Geary, for which many thanks. It has been fascinating to explore these versions and to begin the process of comparing them with other translations that are widely available.

Seamus Heaney once observed that the poems of Constantine Cavafy ‘survive translation better than most’. He thought this was because of the sheer interest of his subject matter(s) and the largely relaxed colloquialism of his voice (see Heaney’s Foreword to C.P. Cavafy: The Canon (tr. Stratis Haviaras; Hermes Publishing, 2004). In fact, over the years since his death in 1933, I’m not sure either of these aspects have necessarily proved quite so ‘easy’ to bring into effective English because of our changing sexual mores over the decades and the inevitable shifts in what a reader may register as colloquial language. In The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy, David Harsent presents a small selection of his solutions to such issues.

Alexandria in Cavafy’s time

Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863. His family spent some of the 1870s in England, but the poet had returned by 1885 and rarely left the city after that. He’s perhaps best known for the poem ‘Ithaca’ (not included in Harsent’s selection here) in which the journey to the mythical island is presented as one of exploration, enrichment and experience. Such an attitude to ‘venturing’ is one of the things Heaney must have been thinking of with his comment about the relatability of Cavafy’s subject matter, our common wish for excitement, for the thrill of the voyage. The sort of content Heaney has in mind also includes ‘homoerotic amours in exotic settings, the dooms of tyrants, the . . . destinies of sophists and drifters and soothsayers’ and all conveyed in a calm, clear-sighted language, seldom figurative, never ‘over-elevated’.

David Harsent is especially good at capturing Cavafy’s voice and the colloquialism of the language, though these are certainly versions in the sense that there is some modernising of references, changes made to titles, some transposing and editing of the originals, and significant changes to the flow of Cavafy’s phrasing. There is also a curtailing of Cavafy’s range; as Harsent’s opening note advises: ‘I have chosen, most often, poems of love and loss’. Harsent chooses urban, contemporary scenes, almost wholly focused on homoerotic experiences (current or remembered). Of course, in Cavafy’s Alexandria such relationships would have had to remain hidden, illicit, even a matter of shame. In ‘What’s Hidden’, the final poem here, the liberalising shift in attitudes towards gay love in the future is predicted: ‘One day, / when times and laws and minds have changed, / someone who thinks and feels and loves like me / will live as I do now, but without fear.’ It is this fear, Harsent suggests, that is the ‘weight of sorrow’ carried in so many of these poems. Earlier translators, like Edmund Keeley and Philip Sharrard (1975) and Haviaras (2004), tend to translate Cavafy’s allusions to the ‘illicit’ quality of such encounters, but today this strikes a false note given that we no longer consider them in this light. Interestingly, Harsent has silently removed most of these judgemental allusions from the poems.

You can tell Harsent is a fine poet in these versions. For example, ‘At the Tobacconist’s Window’ is vivid and thrillingly erotic in comparison to the Keeley/Sherrard version, though it may be that Harsent is unwontedly dialling up Cavafy’s deliberately plain statements. Here, there is an immediate entry into the scene (‘A small crowd at the brightly-lit window’) and the reference to the two men is accentuated by repetition (‘these two, these among many’). The men’s eyes meet ‘by chance’ in most other translations, but Harsent writes their ‘eyes, as if meant to, snag softly’. In fact, this works really well, raising the excitement and tension of the possible encounter and the gentle feminine rhyme in ‘softly’ is repeated 6 times in a 10-line poem, building an undulating sense of erotic possibility. The word ‘snag’ falls more harshly and this rough/tender sense is echoed in the closing line when the two men ‘fall on each other, but gently’. By the end of the poem, Harsent’s two men have driven off together and parked up somewhere more private. In Cavafy’s original, of course, they take a closed, or covered, carriage.

Another example of the changes Harsent makes can be seen in the beautiful poem, ‘The Mirror in the Hallway’, in which a delivery boy brings a package to a big house, stands in the hallway and looks into a mirror. Cavafy’s original starts slowly – supplying context, I suppose – with the size of the house, the mirror and its age (eighty years old). Only then does the delivery boy appear. Harsent begins with the ‘beautiful’ boy who, in the original is described as an ‘amateur athlete’ (surely to increase his physical allure). Harsent goes for, ‘on Sundays / he played park football’, which is wonderfully modern, but perhaps doesn’t make him quite so attractive! Left alone, the boy looks at himself in the mirror. Not in the original, Harsent repeats the phrase ‘looked at himself’ in adjacent lines, again dialling up the intensity, but is this what Cavafy would have wanted? This poem ends in the original text with a (perhaps clunky) personification of the mirror which, despite its eighty years of existence, is now ‘bursting with pleasure’ (tr. Haviaras) at having had such a ‘beauty’ before it. Harsent streamlines the moment, though he punctuates into three sentences, interrupting the original’s single flow of one. He does retain the personification, but has the mirror bask, after the event, in its own erotic pleasure:

The mirror looked back. In eighty years

it had seen a thousand faces and shrugged them off.

It held that matchless beauty

long minutes after the boy had gone.

It is fascinating to look closely at Harsent’s decisions in his versioning of these poems. If the criterion of judgement is that a poem should come vividly off the page, then he is succeeding here, though as I have indicated, these are not faithful to the originals in the way that some might require of a translation. But such fidelity might well have been subject to a dose of Cavafy-esque scorn. John Kittmer’s comment on this beautifully produced chapbook, enthusiastically praises the modern poet’s engagement with the Greek originals as ‘examples of exchange, cross-over, transposition, modulation, sensitive homage and daring challenge’. I’d second that emotion and look forward to seeing more of these Cavafy-Harsent poems.

Review of Charles Tomlinson’s ‘The Change of Light’ (2025)

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This review of Charles Tomlinson’s The Change of Light, published by Dare-Gale Press in 2025, first appeared in Acumen magazine, commissioned by reviews’ editor, Andrew Geary. Many thanks for the invitation to write about these fine, posthumously published poems.

Beginning to publish poems in the early 1950s, Charles Tomlinson will have been conscious of his outsider status on several fronts. Antipathetic to the still-echoing boom and verbal excess of Dylan Thomas, and sceptical of the narrowed range and palette of the fashionable Movement poets, the young Tomlinson was also developing an interest in European writing, which only became in vogue with Ted Hughes’ founding of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Even further beyond the pale, his Cambridge friendship with Donald Davie stirred a lifelong enthusiasm for American poetry. His interest in things transatlantic yielded several extended visits to the US, and the 1966 collection American Scenes and Other Poems (OUP) which also boasted a section of ‘Mexican Poems’.

Tomlinson died in 2015 and The Change of Light from Dare-Gale Press is a timely reminder of his excellence. In these 22 late, unpublished poems, there are glimpses of his wide-ranging interests with allusions to French poetry, the Greek Islands, the Adriatic Coast, and even to Japan. But we are in a predominantly English landscape here, consisting of woodlands, rivers, trout streams and gardens. The poems are without exception beautiful in their precision, tonal elegance and civility of expression, pursuing, as Tomlinson always did, both the unfolding of abstract ideas as well as a close engagement with landscape and the natural world.

It is the poet’s acuity of observation that is immediately pleasurable for the reader. In ‘Between Seasons’, Tomlinson looks for Spring to arrive while a hawk moves through the garden, ‘on such sharp and silent wings, / It skims more like a knife’. This sort of equivocation between promise and threat is characteristic of the poet. The poem ‘On the Frontier: in March’ also explores the uncertain ‘swaying frontier’ between the seasons, the precarious balance of which is brilliantly conveyed in the sinuosity of Tomlinson’s syntax which runs as one single sentence through 23 lines, before a breath-taking expansion of vision to Planet Earth itself (‘this wandering sphere, / the unpiloted craft’). As this makes clear, Tomlinson’s often alluded to sense of Eden always did encompass what we now call eco-poetry and in ‘Snow’ the paradisal garden is once again deployed for the beauty of the earth, seen ‘with the eyes now / of its first inhabitants’.

The quality of observation in ‘Trout II’ is likewise as freshly peeled as to feel Edenic. The fish’s ‘wirey curvature’ is held as the water’s currents ‘caress, shape, swerve’ past it. The narrator contrasts the ‘Choice’ the creature has to ride the flow with the lack of choice possessed by a rock in the same stream. The trout has an agency, deciding to hang in the water, and is ‘Willing to be no more than weed / That fluctuates beside him like his shadow’, and in so choosing, the fish transforms its environment into ‘aim, discernment, dance’. Tomlinson imagines the creature acting with ‘pleasure’, a pleasure surely also felt by poet and reader, a pleasure derived in part from the trout’s willing abandonment of its body to the water’s flow.

Tomlinson valued chance in both life and creativity (a 1969 poem is called ‘The Chances of Rhyme’) and to take advantage of chance we need to yield up control. He wrote of embracing possibility, achieved only when the ‘self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality’. This self-forgetfulness, the laying aside of individual personality, is key to Tomlinson’s work (and in passing, it is what makes him a great translator). ‘Raindrops Reconsidered’ contains a pun on the seeing ‘eye (an I)’ which observes best when the ego does not bring with it ‘fable’ or the preconceptions of our daily lives and language. ‘Views’ insists that the genuinely ‘realist’ perception questions the ‘bland misprisions of the day’ so that the everyday world suddenly ‘bursts into wing, flame, flights’, into a perception that is ‘festive’.

This ‘festive’ quality refreshes our acquaintance with the world, but it also opens up vistas in which the diminishment of the self becomes not decrease but an access to something greater. In ‘The Infinite’, sitting on a hillside, beside a hedge, the narrator finds an unnerving tranquillity. The wind in the trees contrasts this, opening up a sense of ‘eternity’ and the individual self vanishes into a wider sphere: ‘In this immensity / my own thoughts drown / and it is sweet to shipwreck in this sea’. For such a poet, the loss of any access to his senses would have been devastating. In 1997, a routine cataract operation went awry and deprived Tomlinson of the sight in his left eye. The loss of binocular vision means judging distances is difficult and Tomlinson here laments the ‘flat projection’ he now has instead of full sight (‘The Accident’).

The poems in The Change of Light would appear to be late work; in ‘Courteous Death’ Tomlinson senses his own mortality. Channelling a little bit of Emily Dickinson, the personification of a surprisingly polite Death advances to greet the poet. In a sudden change of mind, Death offers complete blindness rather than demise. Tomlinson’s ‘one good eye’ refuses (at least for a while). Yet like the rock in ‘Trout II’, there comes a point at which ‘preference has no power’, no choice, though up till now, the poet says, he has expected it to ‘tip the balance / Always in my favour’. But Death allows the poet a little more time, time spent perhaps, in part, on these really fine, pleasing and profound last poems.

Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

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Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). To celebrate the appearance of the book – and do please go to the Shearsman website and buy one (or a signed copy directly from me) – I’m reproducing below the Preface I wrote for the collection. And below that, one of the poem’s from the book, which happily appeared recently in Poetry Review.

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann).

I first encountered Becker’s work while translating an essay on the poet by Lutz Seiler (published in In Case of Loss (And Other Stories, 2024)). Seiler reads Becker’s work as ‘a process that integrate[s] both immediate and more distant modalities of language, his own voice as well as materials drawn from other sources such as events, photos, maps, as well as interjections from neighbouring rooms, from the mail, the news, weather conditions and whatever else stray[s] within range.’ I am very happy that permissions have been granted to enable Seiler’s brilliant essay to stand as an Introduction to this volume.

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

My heartfelt thanks to Tony Frazer at Shearsman Books for his enthusiasm for Becker’s work and ensuring this book came to be.

In the wind

Blackbirds, then other voices. It doesn’t stop

in the snow, when along with the snow

comes a piece of news that, this morning,

is absolutely essential. Or how

do you see it? I see the pear tree and how it

(the pear tree) responds to the wind (to the

wind). This morning, once again, the

decision has been taken. War

between magpies and crows, simply this war,

no fuss, just this clear understanding.

Another voice, the next remark; it’s all (again)

a matter of the whole. Are you standing

in the garden? Then you know, tuck tuck, the blackbird

warned at first, you know it, I’ll say it

again, in the war, in the fresh snow, in the wind.

New Review of ‘Our Weird Regiment’

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This review has just appeared on the Everybody’s Reviewing site. Many thanks for giving this new collection such an insightful and concise reading, Gary Day.

There’s something about Martyn Crucefix’s poetry that reminds me of a theremin, an early electronic musical instrument that was played without being touched. Two antenna detected hand movements and translated them into eerie, vocal sounds. So these poems, without quite touching the substantial world, nevertheless register it in all its oddly ephemeral density. “Our Weird Regiment,” the title work of the collection, recounts a visit to a stately home. It is an exquisite poem, mixing up past and present in images of quiet but devastating power. Who are “the weird regiment”? Tourists, the dead, the conformist crowd and more, all forming a splendid enigma. 

“Heal Thyself,” a reference to Christ’s remark in Luke 4:23, serves as a preface to the three sections which make up the collection: “Ida Belle,” “Flint” and “Homespun.” The poem articulates themes of, among others, direction, displacement, timing, loss, self-disintegration and self-renewal. The imagery is a mixture of the surreal, the matter of fact, the biblical and more. Metaphysical poets were known for their startling conceits and Crucefix is part of that tradition. In an ICU “the emptying beds / cleared swiftly as a busy table service” (“Olly and Pepper Are Safe”). He is also a brilliant imagist. In the same poem we have “the dazzling fireflies of raised phones” and in “He Made This” “naked willows / will be upholstered in inches of snow.” 

No contemporary poet makes more use of allusions than Crucefix. St Augustine, Bede, Easter Island statues, Breughel, Brecht, Henry de Montherlant are just a few examples. They are integral, not decorative, stitching together past and present, amplifying the value of both. Crucefix is a highly intelligent poet acutely attuned to the multiple disintegrations of our time. He offers little in the way of consolation but these poems, these oscillations, are one reason not to despair. 

About the reviewer: Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and author of several books including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama: Tragedy Comedy and Sacrifice. He is also co-editor of The Wiley Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789. His poetry has been highly commended in a number of competitions, most recently in the Write Out Loud Echoes competition. His poem “Spooky Action at a Distance” won last year’s International Brilliant Poetry Competition. His work has appeared in The High Window, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawn Treader as well as various other magazines. 

Another Review of my recent chapbook ‘Walking Away’

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This brief review of my most recent chapbook, Walking Away (Dare-Gale Press, 2025), has been written by Debasish Lahiri and recently appeared on the website Everybody’s Reviewing, Dec 2025. Many thanks to the reviewer for his close reading and enthusiasm about the poems and to Jonathan Taylor who edits the wonderfully lively and interesting site at Everybody’s Reviewing.

Only participles here: their ghosts fill the passing of present and present pasts in Martyn Crucefix’s latest pamphlet Walking Away. One does not need to stand in the mere of biblical lore to realize that the “end” is a process. To be witness to our parents – their touch growing cold upon the warmth of our grasp, often desperate grasp, and their memories slipping like wind through the parapet of our fingers, or sand – is to be in the arc, or archetype, of the end. Crucefix’s poetry talks as much of us who are left behind as of our parents who grow more distant, more alien, without being able to go anywhere. 

           You hear cars hiss along the road
           Cars hissing along the road

           Only present participles

In writing about his parents, and their misted lens of time, where everything is either disconcertingly different, or befuddlingly the same, Crucefix unravels the tyranny of that continuum called the Present. With the deftest of touches he paints a time, the only time where we can be partakers together, but also a cruel time with no recall or hope for a future recognition. 

           Mother of your brother and sister
           Mother of your three sons

           The same car speeding away

Reading this collection one can’t but feel that it all stands up or falls apart depending on the miraculous presence or absence of that hand or arm in the precipitate moment when the mind is afraid, limbs waver on the verge of a fumble and a silent swipe at balance comes up with aether. It isn’t merely furniture that has moved. Care-givers move through the house. A flux of children, wives and kin sweep through. The house turns out to be a Care-Home.

           Dining chair and coffee table 
           Shifted here and there


           Losing you. Your balance too

Walking Away has three shorter poems – “Video Call,” “My Mother’s Care Home Room (as Cleopatra’s monument)” and “In This Quiet One-way West Country Town” – along with the eponymous long sequence of tercets, measuring the calculus of change in human life. Crucefix adapts the Japanese form of the Haiku brilliantly in his long sequence “Walking Away.” This is a sense adaptation of the form, not necessarily a servile conformity to the 5-7-5 syllabic fiat, but a reinterpretation of the dynamic, emphasizing the break (after two lines or one), and corresponding to the idea of the Kireji or the divide in Japanese. Strictly speaking these are more akin to Senryu, poetry that speaks of human life rather than the natural world. 

Crucefix reminds us that living is a one-way road (not just in West Country towns). There’s no way back. Living is a walking away from the consolations of Time, an inexorable moving away of people dearest to us, our parents. His poetry stands up, unflinchingly, to this bruise.

About the reviewer: Debasish Lahiri has nine collections of poetry to his credit, the latest being A Certain Penance of Light (2025). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.