Martyn’s most recent full collection of original poems is called The Lovely Disciplines, published by Seren Books in Summer 2017.
An Italian translation of ‘The renovation near Sansepolcro’ from this collection can be viewed here.
‘Stuart Buck’s review of this collection for Write Out Loud can be read here.
D A Prince’s review of this collection for London Grip can be read here.
Ian Brinton’s review of the book for Tears in the Fence can be read here.
Blurb: Martyn Crucefix’s most recent collection steps straight into a contemporary world where cursors blink, people Skype, consult Google Street View, make erotically-charged visits to the opticians, find ATM receipts in secondhand books of poetry. Acuteness of observation is one of the ‘lovely disciplines’ in this beautifully accomplished book. Poems of flair and delicacy become haunting, slowed-down, perfectly realised waking dreams including a motor-biking boy-racer, strange meetings at Heathrow and images from Crucefix’s native Wiltshire: a toll cottage, the West Kennet long barrow, the weir at Tellisford.
Language itself is the other ‘lovely discipline’ of this book and Crucefix’s untrammelled, unpunctuated lines ebb and flow with an economy and grace that has been honed through his recent translations of Rainer Maria Rilke and the Daodejing. At the centre of the book poems trace family grief in the decline of an older generation as in the cool yet achingly precise description of the unearthing of a mother’s ashes. But Crucefix’s fearless intelligence anticipates a wider, more joyful reconciliation of opposites; in The Lovely Disciplines the ultimate value is love experienced “as if each was at last all creatures / and all things all empty ways / all stones all metals and all streams”.
Here is an audio recording of Martyn reading ‘R_O_M_J_X’ from this collection:
Here are two further poems from this collection:
x
Skype (first published in Stand)
Over the patchwork levels of eastern England
that familiar image
of a banking Spitfire beyond their shoulders
between them it roars
as the war bound them sixty years together
loving to talk though struggling still
to unmute to get the camera going
yet it’s better this way
since he sees who’s talking more easily
he can be more involved
though sometimes the laptop screen
is angled so I catch only the crowns
of grey heads then a giant hand
reaches forward to re-adjust
re-appears holding The Wiltshire Times
its crashes and floods and marriages
and something else too blurred
even if the connection holds
but if it wavers faces split to stained glass
or cubist fragments or fairground mirrors
still talking blithely asking me still
if I can see these crocuses
the lawn in sunshine their bird table
where sparrows in pairs come for food and drink
x
Boy-racer (first published in Magma)
It’s this has been
snarling about our bed
shearing sleep
to fourths and sixteenths
x
until we crack
we climb in the car
head for the beach
he roars back to mock us
x
in a burst of cylinders
red—chrome—black—
bobbing back-wheel
bouncing dangerously
x
skids onto the road
from some blind track
this boy-racer bare-
headed breaking sixty
x
squirms in his seat
dodging flies and grit
grimacing back at us
as he whips left
x
right now he guns
through glittering traffic
his face all grin
above a dark brake light
x
left arm threading
a black helmet by his side
speed and dust please
his bald black bride
Martyn Crucefix 