More than 10 years of blogging on poetry and translation – over 39,000 views in 2024 – now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive: 'one of the top 10 poetry blogs' (Rogue Strands)
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)
With yesterday’s announcement of John Burnside’s death, I thought of this review that I wrote in 2006 of his Selected Poems, published by Cape Poetry. His work meant a lot to me around that time and I enjoyed the chance to try to articulate what I found fascinating in it.
John Burnside’s poetry has, for some years now, been offering us a modern egotistical sublime. With Wordsworth, he shares a responsive delight in nature and daunting powers of self-analysis; also similarly, he can slip towards the prolix and portentous and there is something of the same difficulty with projection into another’s experience. But Burnside’s work frequently achieves a moving sublimity without loosening its grip on reality. He is the only contemporary poet who consistently demonstrates the power of a poetic form that is something other than mini fictional narrative, raw confessional, or condensed dramatic monologue. That he is also successful in writing prose makes his achievement all the more impressive.
His work was recognised in the early 1990s despite bucking the trends of secularism, formalism, and plain/street language. His poetry’s brooding intensity lacked laddish brouhaha. The palette was never broad – rural twilights, leaf litter, owls hunting, tracks across snow – but his eye was always on the margins of such things, where the human and the natural met and negotiated. It felt like something spiritual was about to be said or had been articulated and just missed. This was twinned with the powerfully felt absence of fixed personal identity that has remained so deeply engrained in his work. In poems that in many ways were hardly radical, it was this element that made Burnside feel modern. In a self-regarding culture ever more attached to the teats of mobility, individuality, celebrity and fashion, his relentless worrying away at the obscurity of the self, his flirting with its non-existence, struck dissonant but resonating chords.
Burnside’s themes are frequently disturbing. But in a poem like ‘Halloween’ (from The Myth of the Twin, published in 1994) his exquisite ability to conjure up the British countryside proves to be an essential part of the pleasure of reading him. As often, the season is autumn – cold, mostly deserted, snow, rain, “the fernwork of ice and water”. The narrator peels bark from a tree to smell “its ghost” in a characteristic movement from the precisely evoked physical to the almost casually implied spiritual. What the figure in the landscape is trying to do is to “define my place”. Even scraping down in the leaf mould, he finds fungal traces that look “like the first elusive threads / of unmade souls”. Nearby village bells provide “nothing” and the poem typically ends with the figure’s sense of “other versions of myself” on the periphery of vision and these can be taken to imply other futures, untaken pasts, other roles familiarly adopted, even selves beyond the physical – the inconclusiveness is the point.
Burnside has pursued experiments with differing perspectives that were first signalled by the opening and closing poems of The Myth of the Twin. For example, though in the end less successful than its predecessor, Swimming in the Flood (1995)dramatically broadened his poetry’s reach to include the experience of others, often in more extended form and in dramatic monologues. Persecutors and victims inhabit these poems and speak disturbingly of abuse and “the inexplicable / malice of being” (‘Schadenfreude’). This was a turning point in Burnside’s development as what now flooded into the poetry was what had lain buried in the delicacy and tentativeness of the earlier work. In the ‘The Old Gods’ he declares their power is strongest “when anger or fear / is fuzzing the surface, / making us dizzy and whole”. The process of uncovering is shown to be one of healing and this selection includes the sequence called ‘Burning a Woman’ which seems nakedly to speak of the poet’s mother and father. Equally, the ‘Parousia’ sequence (not included in this Selected) ends with what appear to be sceptical reflections on his earlier inquisition beyond the merely physical: “All resurrections are local . . ./ the sign I have waited to see / is happening now / and always”. Here Burnside seems to arrive at a sense of secular miracle (a version of Rilke’s “Hiersein ist herrlich”) less concerned with the reality of religious presence than with the individual’s response to its possibility.
And yet, the dramatic monologues proved something of a cul de sac. With his subsequent work, Burnside has returned to his best subject: himself. Partly what makes the award-winning The Asylum Dance such a magnificent achievement is the development of the fluid poetic form he combines with a second person plural address that achieves the universal without being either hectoring or twee. The influence of William Carlos Williams is obvious, but Burnside extends this beyond a fluent impressionism concerned with the truth of things to encompass a philosophical musing, the lines flickering across the page as if viewed through water. This new selection is too brief to achieve the full sense of his development, but one of the marvels of Burnside’s work is its continuing delivery of extraordinary evocations of the natural world that have become gradually melded with an introspective depth that does not merely offer insight, but sustained meditation. The four long sequences from The Asylum Dance are rightly given space here and constitute a masterpiece in which the poems offer up rich, disturbing, beautiful, precise, profound, and sustained experiences undergone in the act of reading, rather than a lesser poetry’s marshalling of moments of insight and feeling. Burnside’s career already provides ample proof of a fascinating and significant artistic development, and this selection will prove a good starting point for anyone not yet following it.
The invitation at the opening of these two remarkable sequences of poems by Martyn Crucefix emphasises both ‘difference’ and ‘ambiguity’, an ‘othering’ which hones attention rather than dulling it.
Divided into two sections, Works and Days (forty-nine poems) and O, at the Edge of the Gorge (fourteen poems) the two landscapes bring into focus a post-2016 Britain and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy. The leitmotif which threads its pathway, its recurring echo, through the first section is of ‘all the bridges’ being ‘down’ and the epigraph to section two is a quotation from Canto 16 of Dante’s Paradiso in which cities pass out of existence through warfare or disease and that which may have seemed permanent is continuously in movement. That second section of poems is a sequence of sonnets and in the final one the hawk’s resting place in the ‘shivering of poplars’ sways so that he is neither falling nor at ease
with these thinnest of airs beneath him
these shapes of loose knotted mesh
these whisperings that cradle him on a whim
That ‘othering’ prompts the poet to see the differences that are ‘like crimes woven into the weft’ and, in a way that William Blake would have recognised in his ‘A Poison Tree’, envy can be ‘buried long years in the black heart / of expressed admiration’ and ‘sunshine’ can be ‘really the withering of night’ which is ‘poured into soil where wheat grows’. And so it is—‘in and around and over and above’ because ‘all the bridges are down’.
In April 2007 Jeremy Prynne wrote some notes for students about poems and translation:
Translation is for sure a noble art, making bridges for readers who want to cross the divide between their own culture and those cultures which are situated in other parts of the world; and yet a material bridge is passive and inert, without any life of its own, whereas a poetic translator must try to make a living construction with its own energy and powers of expression, to convey the active experience of a foreign original text.
As a translator of real distinction (Rilke’s Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus) Crucefix has for many years made these living constructions offering readers a gateway into new experiences whether it be through the world of Laozi’s Daodejing (Enitharmon Press, 2016) or through these new poems which offer echoes both of Hesiod’s Work and Days and the poems known as a vacanna which originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10-12th century India. His understanding of the central role language plays in our lives, that creation of bridges between humans, was one of the deeply moving and memorable moments in his collection from Seren in 2017, The Lovely Disciplines. There the poem ‘Words and things’ presented an elderly individual who discovered ‘too late this absence of words’ which now ‘builds a prison’ and Crucefix recognised that ‘a man without language is no man’: as the world of objects becomes too difficult to dominate he can only have knowledge of a world which ‘turns in your loosening grip’. The echo of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ is surely no accidental one!
Translations are bridges, language is a bridge, and the distressing recognition of isolation within numbers is the dominant image in ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ from the first section of this new book:
fifteen kilometres of traffic wait before us
behind us the infinite tail
x
we are offered Google Map options
yet those trumpeted ten minute economies
x
are nothing till they can be proved
you make a choice you go your own way –
x
this has been better said before of course –
you cannot take the other way
x
and remain a unitary being on two paths
or perhaps sane – all roads crawl north
x
because multiple millions of cars crawl north
because all the bridges are down
Those ten minute trumpetings bring the world of Orwell’s 1984 to my mind as loud announcements of positive news seem to possess a tinny emptiness to the understanding of the isolated human who exists in a world of no bridges.
However, in contrast to this wave of uniformity one reads moments of ‘othering’ in the second section of this book as in ‘sharpening gusts along the valley floor’ a scrap of air was birthed
whirling inches above a littered drain
in a back street of some hilltop town
x
like Urbisaglia or some place that has seen
and has survived change of use
from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse
and no gully nor hill can stop it
In this moving world ‘great swathes of air’ gather strength to flex ‘all things to a scurrying to keep up / and the truth is some will and some will fail’.
In a poem titled ‘can you imagine’ (for my children) from the first section of Between a Drowning Man the power of language to translate the invisible onto the page is presented with an unerring eye focussed upon reality. In a world in which he no longer shares the companionship of others the poet is carried safely because although ‘you find the bridges between us fallen down’ and although ‘you mourn’ you can still ‘imagine’. That sense of continuity held in the imagination is far from the image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey, in 2015 whose death was recorded by Crucefix’s earlier book, Cargo of Limbs, from Hercules Editions in 2019. The boy’s family had fled from the war engulfing Syria in the hope of joining relatives in the safety of Canada and became ‘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, 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.
In this new book that ‘whim’ of a resting place for the hawk, those ‘whisperings’ prompt the bird, the poet, ‘to call it yet more steady perhaps’:
Many thanks to Mat Riches for this fulsome and acute reading of my recent collection from Salt Publishing. The review first appeared onThe High Window – Jan 2024
The introduction to the first section of Between a Drowning Man states that it draws on two texts. The first is Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the second of which is described as
the type of poem known as a vacanna originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10-12th century India. using plain language, repetition and refrain they were written to praise the god, Siva, though also expressed a great deal of personal anger, puzzlement, even despair about the human condition […]
This helped put everything into context for what followed. One third of the way in I started to think of it as a man shouting at clouds in book form, of someone railing at things in the world that are beyond our control. And maybe it is all of this, but it also much more than this. I think it becomes a lesson in acceptance.
In a post on his own Blog, Crucefix describes these poems as starting to arrive after reading the vacanna poems in 2016, and how the poems began to accumulate after that while ‘staying in Keswick at the time and I vividly remember scribbling down brief pieces at all times of the day and night’ and of having been influenced by Brexit (the bridges are down indeed). However, he also describes in a follow up post that:
I thought of the poetry I was writing as a quite narrowly focused topical intervention, but in the last 4 or 5 years …the poems have come to seem less dependent on their times and more capable of being read as a series of observations – and passionate pleas – for a more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture.
And while the Brexit reading is there, these poems speak more to grounding a modern and disconnected world (despite plenty of references to devices for and modes of communication—we’ll come back to that shortly) in timeless themes like love and desire, parenting, ageing, joy in nature, false idols, and much more, and this is just in the first twenty or so pages.
Picking one of those themes at random, we can see how false idols are covered, but also how deftly he weaves in modern references to something that is both timeless, and of its time, and with that very human. In ‘the six pack on the side’ we are told:
the clock is a sinister and impassive god for the ancients rumour was a kind of god …
the god of WiFi when we curse its absence and when did difference become a god
We have always been a narcissistic species that pays attention to gossip (‘rumour was a kind of god’), but while our gods have changed as the centuries have passed, we still curse our gods when they forsake us. Not a bad return for a 19-line poem in my opinion.
In order to achieve the ‘more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture’ we can see several pleas for more open lines of communication throughout the poems. Some are located in the specific and familial, as in ‘watch the child’ and its discussion of a child chattering away to herself in a coffee shop with her ‘bright picture book’ juxtaposed with ‘her mother at her cooling latte / at her macchiato / at her cooling skinny medium cappuccino // […] her mother’s ears wired casually // with two scarlet buds.
The child is broadcasting and communicating in a carefree way vs the mother’s more deliberate inward-looking approach, a shutting the world out for some respite. And while this could be a judgmental poem; it’s not. It feels like an invitation to consider both sides, both needs here. The refrain of ‘all the bridges are down’ lands particularly well here, both for the protagonists of the poem, but also for the reader.
However, while some pleas are located in the specific there are some more general ones to be found. In ‘he thought of this time’ one man recounts a litany of disappointments and emotions from his father. The poem draws from Hesiod and his idea of the fifth age where modern man was created by Zeus to be evil, selfish, weary, and burdened with sorrow. It’s a two-footed tackle on humanity from the whistle:
he thought of this time as a fifth age that he’d be better off dead or not yet born working all day he would fear the night had heard of children born prematurely grey and the fraying bond between fathers and sons between mothers and daughters between host and guest between different races
It continues without reprieve about a world where:
[…]the hopeless are advanced and further advancement lavished for no more than just chancing it respect a word more spoken than heard the educated full of corrosive cleverness and compassion the greatest of virtues an ebbing tide you see where it glints on the horizon
At the time of writing, it’s easy to feel like these lines are as contemporary as it’s possible to be, and yet it’s arguable they are evergreen observations about humanity. However, I suspect that’s the point.
We’ve touched upon references to modern-day totems like WiFi, coffee types and headphones already, but this section is filled with them. Further examples include references to Google Maps and ‘five-star online reviews’ in ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ and ‘stoke a fire under your silk blouse’ respectively.
This all reaches its zenith in the final poem of the section, ‘this morning round noon’. The poem moves from personal notes about scattering ashes, a son’s birthday (and him being in huge debt at 21, one presumes from being at university) through to:
an American punk band form Nashville posting abuse about a young Buddhist woman refusing anaesthetic
The lines are punctuated by phrases like ‘likesharelike’ or ‘likeclicklike’ or ‘smileyfaceicon’. It’s the diaristic nature of the whole section writ large and transmitting thoughts to the page (albeit the printed page, not the Facebook page) as they occur. As an aside, this running together of words, coupled with the entire book’s distinct and clearly deliberate lack of punctuation (save a few dashes here and there) add to the observational nature of the poems, of thoughts being pulled from the ether. However, this is very much not to say that these poems aren’t considered and crafted—they very much are.
The final line of the poem and section is ‘I say the Pantone chart is one of my favourite things’, and while the poem that proceeds this line could be read as a darker version of the Sound of Music classic, less Raindrops on roses and more ‘I was hit by a car likeshare’, but I prefer to take it as a sign that the poem end on acceptance of nuance, variation and being able to communicate the same needs.
As the first section comes to an end there are two poems where the last line of one resurfaces as the start of the next, and it feels like a teaser for what follows in the second section, O. at the Edge of the Gorge.
This was previously published as a pamphlet by Guillemot Press in 2017 and is a crown of sonnets. After the hectic modernity of the first section, there is much to be said for the relative calm of following a traveller, Orpheus, on a journey through Italian countryside observing ‘Glossy fleet black clods of carpenter bees / swirl at the corner of the house / then sink onto spindly lavender stems / alight on blooms stooped // with the weight of insect lives’.
It’s a beautiful opening and a beautiful image that should perhaps be filmed and used as a fine example of what was briefly known as slow TV and shown on BBC4, but in the second poem he describes ‘astronomical time marked by light’ as the sun descends the gorge and church bells tolling, but:
yet come nightfall a different sense these same sounds sound notes more chilling…
A very real sense of for whom the bell tolls, indeed. As the traveller wends their way round the area, taking notes and sketches of birds, a ‘flock of white doves’, that darkness returns in the form of a buzzard in the eighth sonnet, and gets deeper still in the ninth where he mentions:
like Urbisaglia or some place has seen and survived change of use from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse and no gully nor hill can stop it
Urbisaglia is an ancient town in Mid-East Italy that became the site of an internment camp during the second world war, and that knowledge adds further weight to the stanza that begins sonnet ten:
The truth is some survive a while most fail to conceive the scale of paperwork to follow change of use from church to temple next to slaughterhouse.
The cruelty of humanity to itself is mirrored in the “bloody festival / of the bird” in sonnet thirteen as it discusses a raptor above the gorge, and the final sonnet off this crown muses on the fragility of life:
All creatures die sooner blind to the hawk— left clutching no more than this as if the hammock he occupies each and all night too as if strung out
[…] not falling yet not ever at ease
‘not ever at ease’ could so easily be a final motif for the whole collection. There is a sense that the learnings of this collection are hard won, but there is a connection to the wider world to be had, and that we can find comfort in travelling through it. The final lines of ‘you are not in search of’ in the first section seem apt as a place to leave it:
you might say this aloud—by way of ritual— there goes one who thought much of life
who found joy in return for a little gratitude.
Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence. Recent work has been in Wild Court, The New Statesman, The Friday Poem, Bad Lilies, Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings. A pamphlet called Collecting the Data is out via Red Squirrel Press. Twitter @matriches Blog: Wear The Fox Hat
Stuart Henson has also written a fine review of Between a Drowning Man, which has recently been posted on the London Grip site. You can read the whole review here:
I’m very pleased to announce that Mark McGuinness’ excellent poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air, which has recently featured poets such as Mona Arshi, Judy Brown, Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig, Mimi Khalvati, Clare Pollard, Tom Sastry, and Denise Saul, has recorded a discussion about my new Salt collection, Between a Drowning Man.
Mark’s method is to focus on one particular poem and between us we chose the poem ‘you are not in search of’, on page 57 of the new book, from the latter end of the ‘Works and Days’ sequence. You can listen to the podcast here. It’s about 40 minutes in length and includes a reading of the poem at the beginning and end. There is also a helpful transcription of our discussion.
Here is the poem text – though without the indents which are hard to reproduce here:
Last week, with the imminent arrival of my new book of poems, Between a Drowning Man, I decided it would be useful – for those who would like to know – if I re-blogged a piece I wrote and posted early in 2019 about one of the key sources and inspirations of the new book’s main sequence of poems called ‘Works and Days’. The focus then was on my reading of AK Ramanujan’s collection of vacana poems. But later in the process of completing the full sequence, it was further formed (or reformed or deformed) by rather different pressures derived from a second literary antecedent, the reading of which was itself influenced by the febrile and divided atmosphere surrounding political events in the UK between 2016 and 2019. I mean, of course, Brexit.
At the time, I thought of the poetry I was writing as a quite narrowly focused topical intervention, but in the last 4 or 5 years (partly with the greater clarity with which the Brexit heist can be now seen to have been foisted on the country), the poems have come to seem less dependent on their times and more capable of being read as a series of observations – and passionate pleas – for a more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture. It was Hesiod’s pre-Homeric poem, Works and Days, that suddenly felt oddly familiar: in it he is not harking back to an already lost era, nor to past heroic (in our case imperial) events. Instead, Hesiod talks about his own, contemporary workaday world, offering advice to his brother because the pair of them seem to be in some sort of a dispute with each other (a squabble over limited resources – that sounded familiar).
So my developing sequence took over from Hesiod the idea of familial disputes, the importance of the persistence of Hope (in the Pandora’s jar story), the idea that we need to understand that we are living in an Age of Iron (not idealised Gold). Poetry can never be summarised by its own conclusions but the poems seemed to me to be arguing the need to work hard – to have patience – not to buy into fairy tales of a recoverable golden age that probably never existed anyway. If all this sounds interesting, do click on the blog title below to read the whole of my original post. After a bit of New Year 2019 preamble, the discussion of Hesiod begins at paragraph 3.
My first public reading of these poems from my new book will be on the evening of Tuesday 24th October at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. I’ll be reading alongside 2 other Salt poets: Elisabeth Sennitt-Clough – ‘My Name is Abilene’ (Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize); and Becky Varley-Winter – ‘Dangerous Enough’ (‘daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world’).
With the arrival of my new book of poems, Between a Drowning Man, imminent, I thought it would be useful to re-blog a piece I wrote and posted early in 2019 about one of the key sources and inspirations of the new book’s main sequence of poems called ‘Works and Days’. It was my fortuitous reading of AK Ramanujan’s collection of vacana poems, early in 2016 (all explained below), that set me off experimenting with a similar clipped, plain, rapid, fluid style with its (refrain like) repetitions. I was staying in Keswick at the time and I vividly remember scribbling down brief pieces at all times of the day and night. Outside, and interfering with the various walking expeditions we had planned, the great storm of the winter of 2015/6 (googling it now, it was Storm Desmond) had taken out many of the ancient bridges in the Cumbrian countryside. Inevitably, this fact found its way into the poems and provided the refrain I used in many of them.
It has been a long haul between that period and the poems’ eventual appearance in this new collection and the whole sequence was further formed (or reformed or deformed) by pressures of a second literary antecedent (I’ll blog about that next week) and by the divisive political events in the UK between 2016 and 2019. Click on the blog title below to read the whole of the original post. My first public reading from the new book will be on the evening of Tuesday 24th October at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. I’ll be reading alongside 2 other Salt poets: Elisabeth Sennitt-Clough – ‘My Name is Abilene’ (Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize); and Becky Varley-Winter – ‘Dangerous Enough’ (‘daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world’).
I have recently been writing a piece for the excellent site, The Friday Poem, or the FRIP as it styles itself, edited by Hilary Menos. I’d had a poem accepted by the FRIP earlier this year and Hilary had asked if I’d like to contribute something in prose, perhaps choosing 3 ‘desert island’ poems. An impossible challenge, of course – only three!!?? – but an interesting exercise to be sure. I’ll say no more about what I submitted to the FRIP before it appears there in the near future, only to say that one of the poems I chose was by Edward Thomas.
In introducing ET’s poem, I found myself talking about his prose travelogue, In Pursuit of Spring (1914). This book – apart from being wonderfully evocative of a lost, pre-WWI England, as he cycles from London, through the South Country, to end up in the Quantock Hills – has always been special for me because he makes a stopover just outside my hometown of Trowbridge, in Wiltshire. The following day he cycles out of Trowbridge, through Hilperton (the village where I grew up), out to Semington, towards Melksham, then along the meadows at Challimead, to Holt, before passing the Nestle factory at Staverton. The latter, with its River Avon (the Bristol Avon) flowing nearby, was where I used to go fishing with our next-door neighbours. The factory is also where several generations of my own family worked, including my maternal grandparents and my mother. Thomas’s descriptions of the roads and countryside are vivid:
. . . the Phoenix ‘Swiss’ Milk Factory where I crossed the Avon at Staverton . . . is an enormous stone cube, with multitudinous windows all alike, and at the back of it two tall chimneys. The Avon winding at its foot is a beautiful, willowy river. On the opposite side of the road and bridge the river bank rises up steeply, clothed evenly in elms, and crowned by Staverton’s little church which the trees half conceal.
The ‘Milk Factory’ at Staverton and the bridge over the Avon
That church is where my grandparents were married. The following day, Thomas sets off again but stops this time at Tellisford. This is a small village to the west of Trowbridge, where a bridge crosses the River Frome. I’d occasionally come fishing here too, and later for the occasional romantic tryst, though more often the trip was for a picnic on the idyllic riverside meadows, listening to the water flowing over the ancient weir. Thomas’s mysterious companion, simply called the ‘Other Man’, describes the scene in 1914:
. . . a beautiful meadow slopes between the river and the woods above. This grass, which becomes level for a few yards nearest the bank, was the best possible place, said the Other Man, for running in the sun after bathing at the weir – we could see its white wall of foam half a mile higher up the river, which was concealed by alders beyond.
Almost nothing had changed when, years later, my whole family came here for a picnic, perhaps to celebrate my parents wedding anniversary . . . I remember speaking to a man who lived nearby. He was rebuilding the weir which had fallen into disrepair. Years later again, I wrote a poem about the occasion (later published in my book The Lovely Disciplines (Seren Books, 2017). Called ‘Rebuilding Tellisford weir’, I gave the poem an epigraph from In Pursuit of Spring: ‘turn aside to see Tellisford’. The poem’s opening lines focus on the man’s self-given task, one of both conservation and innovation:
He refuses shade in midday heat
the old man walking
in his honey-brimmed hat
along the drained weir-shelf
x
that looks today like stacked loaves
its pallid smooth ranks
of Victorian stones
mapping precisely the Domesday line
x
where he patrols to and fro
proudly surveying the place he owns
this stretch of England
his plan to restore the workings
x
of the old watermill
to feed the Grid—and it is for this
he has ordered tons of sludge
to be dredged above the drop
x
and dozens of loosened stones
to be replaced to give
the mill-race its full head
and today he walks the slippery length
x
of the dammed weir-shelf
View of Tellisford Weir
For some reason, in my writing of the poem, I wanted to distance my own family’s part in the scene, perhaps because the incident I was recalling was a long while ago. The man hails the picnickers (rather than the other way round, which is I think what happened):
he cries what marvellous weather
x
then falls to conversation with a couple
who are celebrating sixty years
in their self-built house
with their three good boys
x
raised and schooled to distant homes
though today they recline
on trashy garden chairs
on this riverbank as if to watch
x
the old man in an antique yellow hat
who walks noting progress
on the weir
Riverside littering
My own family appear more as careless tourists than anything else. It is the man’s project which gets more attention. And – as the thought develops – it is his own state of mind that seems to interest the poem.
and how could they know
he’s something on his mind
x
for the next hundred years
how could they know more and more
these days he struggles to endure
the roaring of the fish-shoot
x
with its silted water
and these stilted conversations
with such ordinary people
their Diet Coke and egg mayonnaise
x
their crisps for the grandchildren
their Sunday newspapers
let blow and tumble across the meadow
reminding him of himself
x
how his mind often strays
up the ditch-line to the old drovers’ road
where for fifty years
their cars have pinked and purred
x
especially at night as they mount
slowly the gravel verge—
O so many love-cars for so many years
drawn to his father’s land
x
each in pursuit of what the river gives
of moonlight and chance
of the ticking of an engine
as it cools of blonde hair spilling
x
across dark seats in disarray
he knows the windows rolled to the dusk
the sickly smell of water
the murmur within
I rather like the way the poem, by this stage, seems to be moving in and out of various consciousnesses; here the narrative seems to be visiting the minds of the lovers who come to this quiet place for privacy, though the man’s noting of the fact has something of the voyeur about it too. He goes on to imagine – or perhaps he is remembering his own romantic experiences – the ‘talk / when it’s over’:
though he knows well
it is never really over—
and it’s because of this
he will not turn them away
x
although they holler and soil and litter
still he’d grant them every wish
for this his feet edge now across
the weir-shelf this afternoon
x
for this he takes his uneasy stand
hands thrust in his pockets
their cars pulling in to the dark hiss
of white gravel everywhere loosening
ET looking particularly dejected . . .
The final image – syntactically, the last given reason as to why he allows the lovers, as well as the ill-behaved picnickers, to use the riverside that (in the poem at least) he owns – is intended as an image of transience, of impermanence. It’s this knowledge that really drives him in his conservation project, the rebuilding of the weir, the installation of generators to connect to the Grid. His obsession (which is of course really the author’s, my own) is with the passage of time which brings in change and destruction and against which he builds (as the author builds the poem) something to stand against it, a kind of memorialisation which is also an innovation: ‘the talk / when it’s over though he knows well / it is never really over’. Throughout, I wanted to evoke something of Edward Thomas’s own work, partly through my formal choices. In ‘Gone, gone again’, for example, he views an old house:
‘An ‘Autumn Journal’ for our times.’ —Nancy Campbell
‘Each poem is such a thoughtful space to enter. Crucefix’s skill at managing sequences is stunning. In language that arrests, disturbs, and provokes reflection, each poem refracts and reflects the whole. By examining contemporary life in all its flawed difficulty, including ‘how we other everything/ and everyone we meet’, these poems call for us to witness how our vulnerability isolates and unites us, and ultimately to ‘lay down difference’. —Heidi Williamson
‘[The poems] have the urgency and the hurt we perhaps require now, it is good for poetry to speak up when it is compelled to do so, at times like this and in this way’ —Stephen Romer
Listen to Martyn discussing the background and the writing of the poems in this new collection in these two podcasts:
BLURB OF THIS BOOK: Martyn Crucefix’s new collection of poems traces the forensic unfolding of two landscapes – contemporary Britain post-2016 and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy. Both places are vividly evoked – the coffee shops, traffic tailbacks, shopping malls, tourist-dotted hillsides and valleys of modern Britain appear in stark contrast to the hilltop villages, church spires, deep gorges, natural history and Classical ruins of Italy. Both landscapes come to represent psychic journeys: closer to home there is division everywhere – depicted in both tragic and comic detail – that only a metaphorical death of the self seems likely to counteract. Closer to the Mediterranean, the geographical and personal, or romantic, divisions are also shown ultimately to offer possibilities of transcendence.
The poems of the longer sequence, ‘Works and Days’, are startlingly free-wheeling, allusive – brilliantly deploying source materials and inspiration from Hesiod’s original and the 10/12th century Indian vacana poems – all bound together by the repeated refrain of bridges breaking down. The Italian poems, as a crown of sonnets, are more formally controlled, but the repeating of first and last lines of the individual poems likewise serves to suggest the presence of an overarching unity.
In the end, both sequences travel towards death which – while not denying the reality of human mortality, the passage of time – is intended to represent a challenge to the powerful dividing walls between Thee and Me, the liberation of empathetic feeling, even the Daoist erasure of the assumed gulf between self and not-self: ‘these millions of us aspiring to the condition / of ubiquitous dust on the fiery water’.
Martyn Crucefix 