O. at the Edge of the Gorge (Guillemot Press)

In October 2017,  Guillemot Press published O. at the Edge of the Gorge, with images by Phyllida Bluemel: “As much a celebration of vividly lived experience as daunted by the ruinous passing of time, the voice in these poems is an Orphic one. It contemplates a journey into the “depths of the gorge” and the dangers or redemption that lie there. This fourteen-poem crown of sonnets is filled with the landscape and natural history of the Marche of east Italy”. 

Listen to Martyn reading 3 sonnets from this sequence here.

“Under Crucefix’s eye, the inhabitants of the place are picked out in detail that resists intimacy, and even inanimate things are touched by death. The O falters and is emptied, of the actual presence of complete history, yet this singing is entirely and angularly beautiful. The knowledge gathered from this approach to the edge is troubling and keening” – read more of Alison Graham’s Glasgow Review of Books review of this chapbook here.

“The gorge is full of life, the scufflings of small creatures, the bodies, the voices of mythic lovers, and by the end of the sequence the whole piece coheres into a profound— and rather beautiful— meditation on the oneness of the world and ‘the terrible shortness of time’.” Stuart Henson’s full review of O. at the Edge of the Gorge (and A Convoy) can be read here.

Helena Nelson’s review of this chapbook can be read here.

Images of this chapbook in production:

A Convoy (If a Leaf Falls Press)

Also in October 2017 Sam Riviere’s If a Leaf Falls Press published Martyn’s short abecedary sequence,  A Convoy.

“It works magically. The functions of memory and dream are foregrounded. Fragmentation is both medium and message. You end up feeling that this is exactly how it must have been. The story is all the more haunting because the loose ends will never quite tie up.” – Stuart Henson, London Grip.