Enitharmon Press

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 #3

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, Classical poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecological poetry, ecopoetry, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, political poetry, translation, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is the third 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 three poems can be read here. In these next 3 poems, Penelope finds herself thinking about the island’s volcanic past and about the tourists who come to this modern version of Ithaca. What are they looking for? Odysseus has taken to reading Ibsen (of all writers) and questions his old attitudes to language, purpose, to the ‘things / laid open around him’. Telemachus, meanwhile, can only bitterly see reflections of himself in the island’s schoolchildren, even in the island’s desolate landscape.

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 watches a fragment of rock

where her husband

rakes black leaves from the blue water

she watches them ruddy their faces

x

off-comers holding their breath behind

the Paradise Hotel

x

words like appointment

second quarter cumulative results

becoming a strange language to them—

x

their longest meeting poolside at noon

where dolphin-like

x

they go ducking for silly-coloured stones

the stubbled father

resting one on his belly

x

floating

as youngsters splash to plunder it

folding up around the black

x

micro-aerated chunk of volcanic clinker

picked from the wall—

x

the eye of a shark

once punched well past the cruising height

of in-coming white jets

x

extruded at such extravagant pressures

superheated shot past

x

self-determination

the long wait paying off now time settles

to slower rhythms

x

it sidles

down through the clear blue water

x

he considers the uses of his mouth

sits down with one of those great writers

who managed to survive

nearer the Arctic Circle

x

who kept a scorpion under a glass

till he saw it visibly sickening

x

would fetch soft fruit

for it to sting

x

poison expelled it would be well again—

x

what has accumulated within him

over the years

he sees now as incoherence

x

as a submerged and unmapped ocean bed

invisible from the quayside

x

and the looked-for cure

to bring it into relation with language

x

though not mere eloquence this time

rather a purpose

x

more worthy than the need to persuade

than this blind

preservation of the healthy organism—

x

what must be loosed in his mouth

he thinks of these days

as some finer sense as stark contradiction

x

to his old occlusion

what must be loosened and laid open

x

to the multitude of things

laid open around him

x

more smile than sting

x

his son has a vision of the lava flows

after ten years

then ten more lost at sea

his son would sometimes catch him fretting

x

at the school’s new green security gate

x

watching each year-group

growing restive

fumbling with how to fulfil themselves

x

children

ignorant of how to work themselves

into their own lives—

x

like the island’s native rock

blackened and pocked as a fossil sponge

x

completely unworkable

so the art of sculpture never took root

where tarmac ribbons

x

cut across fields of lava

razor-edges murderous to shoe leather—

x

still boys free wheel off the road

at any hour of the day

x

to stand cooling

in the empty mouths of airless tunnels

no taller than themselves

x

where lava-flows boiled

each burrowing far beneath hardening crust

x

threads glowing huge and slug-like

undeflected heads down

x

single-mindedly

shouldering their way to the sea

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.

John Greening reviews my new chapbook ‘Walking Away’

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

John Greening has recently reviewed my new chapbook of poems, Walking Away (Dare-Gale Press, 2025), a review which first appeared on The High Window website. Many thanks to David Cooke at THW and to the reviewer for his kind and perceptive comments about a set of poems for which I feel (an obvious) affection. Mum and Dad would be bemused by it all I think, but pleased to be so remembered.

Martyn Crucefix has come a long way since his remarkable Enitharmon debut, Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990). Learning, no doubt, from poetry he has since translated or adapted – notably Rilke, but also Peter Huchel, Rosalía de Castro and the Daodejing (more familiar as the Tao te Ching) – he has become more and more experimental, more complicatedly troubled. This was especially evident in his 2017 sequence A Convoy and in the beautifully illustrated Cargo of Limbs from Hercules Editions (2019), itself a version of Book Six of the Aeneid. 

Walking Away is more straightforward and in some ways a shift towards a major key, though the subject matter might make it appear otherwise. Even the tranquil landscape on the cover reminds us that Crucefix has always had a pastoral streak: he was, after all, brought up in the West Country, which features here a good deal, if elegiacally.  The book is dedicated to his parents and it opens with a ‘Video Call’ full of tragi-comic touches (the camera is ‘angled so I catch only the crowns // of grey heads then a giant hand/reaches forward to re-adjust’) and ends with gracefully formal stanzas evoking a ‘provincial market town’ (Trowbridge, perhaps, near the Wiltshire village where Crucefix grew up?).

Fourteen of the pamphlet’s pages are occupied by the remarkable title sequence of four-line poems (drawing on ‘the vivid, condensed power of the haiku form’, as the blurb puts it, but each of a different syllable count) about the decline of the poet’s elderly mother, whose state is addressed more directly in the penultimate poem of the four in Walking Away: ‘My Mother’s Care-home Room (as Cleopatra’s Monument)’. She is portrayed unsparingly with ‘an Easter Island profile / gaunt and beaked’ but becomes a regal presence by the poem’s end as her son keeps his vigil with a final flourish of rhyme:

with all the helpless-
ness of a Charmian
at the cooling feet
of her brave Queen
the asp flung down
beneath the only chair
there has ever been

The title sequence, however, is the book’s great success, a brilliant series of vignettes, like theatre music without the play, set largely, it seems, during a period when the poet’s mother was in her own home. Some of these don’t feel like haiku, but others have that unmistakable, indefinable quality – perhaps to do with awareness of the seasons:

Turning in at your mother’s front gate
Eighty years at a stroke

Swifts no longer nesting

Crucefix knows how to find the Imagistic essence of a situation, as the form demands; and his gift for metaphor has always been considerable:

This week’s new dosette box
Grey windows not yet broken

Twenty-eight channels nothing on

Once you work out what a ‘dosette box’ is (one of those compartmentalized containers for daily tablets), the image here is potent and at least as good as ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’. For their full effect, these fragments do need each other, and they don’t often need such glossing. Take the next one, only the third in the sequence:

Telephone numerals are big and bold
The size of Scrabble pieces

A language you once knew

The brevity is fitting, since that’s often the way one communicates with those in decline; there is tea, a shared remark, more tea, a view of a lawn, knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, a car passing, a nap, a scratching mouse, ‘The clamour of carers / A microwave ping’. And while nothing connects with nothing, we are embraced by an intense emotion and a sense of an approaching end.  Walking Away demands to be read.

Fire River Poets – Zoom Reading 6th November 2025

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I will be giving a reading for the Fire River Poets based in Taunton, UK, on Thursday 6th November from 19:15 – 22:00.

I will be reading in two 15/20 minute slots and there is an opportunity for floor readers if you sign up in advance.

More details as they have been given to me are here….

https://fireriverpoets.org.uk/2024/12/november-6th-2025-martyn-crucefix/

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87214798048?pwd=FyMb8nRhPvbXN6FTSYS0ESfBbvPLJc.1

Topic: Fire River Poets with Martyn Crucefix
Time: Nov 6, 2025 07:15 PM London
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Jeremy Reed’s ‘Collusive Strangers: new selected poems’ (1979-2016) reviewed

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An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it.

As the editor, Grevel Lindop, says in his Introduction to Collusive Strangers: New Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2024), the literary world has not taken enough notice of the remarkable oeuvre of Jeremy Reed. Many of his recent collections have appeared without much, if any, critical notice, so it’s to be hoped that this substantial new selection, from 1979 -2016, will bring this misfit-poet’s work back to more general attention. The problem is that the protean Reed fits no pigeonhole, plus the fact that he’s been astonishingly prolific. Intensity of perception and a phenomenal dynamism of language and creativity are his hallmarks, and he matches the best in nature poetry (Clare and Hughes), the decadent, urban flaneur (Baudelaire), then writes as Symbolist and Surrealist (Gascoyne), pursues sci-fi, focuses on pop and fashion, next becomes a portraitist and moving elegist. Even given these 300 pages, Reed – a sometime Peter Pan now into his 70’s – continues to be elusive. Compared to the prolific poet/novelist John Burnside, the difference is clear: we all knew what the brilliant, much-missed John was up to. With Reed, we are endlessly being caught by surprise.

Even Reed’s earliest work arrived fully formed. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the urban, neurasthenic wanderer appears in ‘Claustrophobia (Kings Cross)’, the narrator’s need being ‘so strong it might involve the police’. In contrast, ‘Dwight’s Brother’ is an early stanzaic, sci-fi piece, a character from the future obsessed with Manson’s and Nixon’s careers, and ‘the monomania that burns planets’. And the magnificent ‘John Clare’s Journal’ ventriloquises the nature poet’s concerns for the natural world of Helpston, his stumbling literary repute, and fear for the future of his children, ‘laid / out as corpses’. Reed’s ambition is clear from the start, and in a poem like ‘Visit to George Barker’ he evidently empathises with the older poet’s withdrawal and seclusion, his writing contemporaries being harshly judged for a lack of ambition as ‘poets whose very aim is minimal / gesture, earning [Barker’s] dismissal’.

My own first acquaintance with Reed’s writing was in the two volumes from Cape in 1984/5, By the Fisheries and Nero, when James Lasdun edited him. These particularly highlighted the Nature poems, for example ‘Conger’ which outdid Ted Hughes: ‘They’ll shave a finger off with precision, / clean as a horse bite, or close round a hand / and leave it as taut gristle strung on bone.’ In a quieter poem, the narrator is fishing in a harbour, near a ‘desalination plant’, the tautly strung reactions of a shoal of mullet seemingly reflected in the fisherman’s own alertness and nerves (‘By the Fisheries’). ‘Spider Fire’ plays brilliantly with perspectives as every sort of tiny beast and insect flees a wildfire, while the narrator, at a distance, observes ‘a black hoop / ironed into the shire’. Though the first-person pronoun recurs in many poems, Reed is usually not much interested in self-revelation. One wonders, if he was/had been, he might be more widely appreciated, because it’s not that he can’t do it. ‘Visiting Hours’, for example, is enough to make a grown wo/man weep as the narrator visits his father in hospital, economical with the truth that this is ‘terminal’, the child compelled to play the father, the father, ‘like a diver gone on down // to find an exit that was always there, / but never used’. In characteristic ABCB quatrains, ‘Changes’ perhaps records the poet’s re-visiting Jersey and a brother, or boyhood friend, who stayed behind as a farmer, both recognising ‘our youth survives, the present is a gap’. And Lindop includes two remarkable poems from the Nineties collection, in which we seem to get close to Reed’s own autobiographical difficulties, when personal survival seems ‘to be the question’ (‘Samaritans’), and, in ‘Prayer’, Reed addresses a divinity of an uncertain variety, pleading for illumination, for help, a hearing, a pointing of a way out, from guilt, dread, self-injury, poverty, ‘the unappeasable, involuntary / inheritance of lucklessness’.

But Reed deals with topics, rather than ‘issues’, and his work is descriptive in character, never preachy or judgemental, so he seldom offers us his ‘views’. The work is driven by his ‘curiosity’, which both ‘holds us to life and feeds us to the flame’ (‘Moth-Trapper’). His praise of the artist, in ‘Cezanne’, is revealing of his fascination for the ‘ordinary’ and for the shared knowledge that ‘the beautiful / is inherent in all that lives, / and once externalised in its true form, / remains as that’. Over and over again, Reed captures – hence externalises – the true form of things in the colourful, vigorous, unblinking poems selected here. And as the millennium approached, Reed extended his range even further towards ‘all that lives’. There are uncharacteristic political poems (Tony Blair is a particular target), but Reed also writes of the experience of AIDS, and with a Baudelairean dwelling on sexuality, in poems like ‘Transsexual’ and ‘Brothels’, and is drawn closer to popular culture, its fashions, music, and iconic figures. But many of the poems on Madonna, Billie Holiday, Elvis and The Rolling Stones drift to looser forms of summary and the decade from 1993 to the early 2000s contains less brilliant work, though 2006’s Orange Sunshine with its evocations of 1960s London marks a return to form.

Reed as elegist, as in This Is How You Disappear (Enitharmon Press, 2007), was perhaps unexpected, but poems like ‘Paula Stratton’ and ‘John Berger’ (not the art critic) must rate amongst the finest in that genre produced in the last 100 years. The honesty, attention to detail, the empathy extended to his subjects (Stratton was a drug addict; Berger a difficult Jersey friend and Nazi-collaborator), and the apparent ease and beauty of the writing, mean these poems ought to have been anthologised everywhere. The elegiac note is hardly surprising as Reed moves through his seventh decade and poems about socks, potted plants, tea, honey, and cupcakes seem to mark shifts in focus though Reed remains true to his repeated maxim that ‘everything I see [is] poetry’ (‘London Flowers’). The poems retain the vigour and speed that he admires in Plath’s work: ‘her fast ball imagery / on speed-trajectories [. . .] her plugged-in dare-all energies’ (‘Re-reading Sylvia Plath’). As he puts it in an extract from ‘White Bear       and Francis Bacon’, Reed has remained true to his early ambitions ‘to kick poetry into near sci-fi / [. . .] like dirty-bombing the dictionary into my face’ and there are thrills to be had by any reader on every one of these 300 pages in which Reed makes so many contemporary poets look sluggish, mired in virtue signalling, lumbering in form, and monotone compared to his vivid technicolours.

Here is the whole of ‘Elegy for a Polka Dot Shirt’ from Orange Sunshine (2006):

Unreconstructed 60s
ostentation snowed on blue
labelled Jacques Fath, tailored fit,
fished from Retro on a simmmery
cloud hung-over August day,
bought for pop connotations –
high collar with flouncy points,
cotton married to the skin.
Medium size:
              38 cm:
structured for a defined waist
sexless to the vanity
of ownership.
Affordable at £15,
the item begged me to retrieve
its showy staginess.
             Outside, airless haze,
W11 backpacking crowds
random like footage spilled
into a documentary.

Later I tore a fragile seam
tracking towards left underarm,
the fissure sounding like hot oil
pronouncing itself in a pan.
The tear backtracked through history
to the anonymous wearer,
who bought sensation, sold it on
into a chain, the onion skin
thinning from use;
              the scar re-sewn,
but evident, a little glitch
caught in the fabric like a blues
lament,
the singer head-bowed on a stool,
cooking up trouble, while the club
tug at his vulnerability
and modulate applause from hot to cool.

‘Muzzle’ – a new poem for the New Year

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Happy New Year to all of you. We are hoping for the best aren’t we? Come rain, shine or named storm, the poems go on, saying something at least for the individual, the social, for careful consideration of the world out there, the world in here, and the languages we use. I’m posting a poem which has just appeared on New Year’s Day at the excellent Modron Magazine, its strap line is ‘Writing on Nature and the Ecological Crisis’. Glyn F Edwards also interviewed me about the making of the poem and I’ll post the text of that below, along with the link to Modron. Do go and take a good look at what other work they have put up in this new Issue 5. And then subscribe to them. My poem is weirdly formatted – so here is an image of it, lacking its title which is: ‘Muzzle’

On the Writing of ‘Muzzle’

MC: It’s so interesting to be encouraged to look back at the process of writing a poem. I seldom do it (I suspect I’m not alone), forever rushing on to the next ‘best’ thing (we think, we hope). In looking back at ‘Muzzle’ (I find I have the very first draft and several subsequent ones) two things strike me: that it took so long to get to a ‘finish’, and that I’d forgotten how important the context of the poem was to what it might be expressing.

The first draft was scribbled in a notebook in the autumn of 2016. Earlier in the same notebook, I was sketching out thoughts on my, then, just-published version of the classic Chinese poems, the Daodejing (Enitharmon, 2016), preparing for readings I was to give from the book. Elsewhere there are fragments about my parents’ growing difficulties at home and (later) in their care home, plus some quite late drafts of the longish poem about the plight of refugees in the Mediterranean which was published as Cargo of Limbs (Hercules, 2019), and even first drafts of the poems which have eventually come to make up my most recent collection, Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023). Remember, the Brexit referendum took place in June 2016 and if there is an idea that links all these differing creative endeavours (including ‘Muzzle’) it is the idea of ‘division’.

Q1 – Only with the word ‘dog’ at the end of the third stanza does the reader gain a semantic connection to the ‘Muzzle’ in the title of the poem. Of course, Chekhov’s gun was ‘cocked’ all along, and the ‘muzzle’ becomes the open end of a weapon where a bullet escapes. Can you explain a little more of the rationale for this subtle title? 

MC: To my surprise, I find, the first draft has no ‘muzzle’ mentioned in it at all. But the shape and a lot of the substance of the finished poem is already there: the flag-waving men during an idyllic autumn walk (on the Sussex Downs, as far as I remember), the shooting party, even the man and his dog at the end of the poem. The muzzle of a ‘smoking gun’ is clearly implied but the final dog’s muzzle does not make an appearance till quite late (I mean 2020 or so!). In fact, in the first draft I clearly don’t know how to end the poem. There, the walking couple emerge from the wood ‘unscathed’, the dog in the field grows tense, and there’s a sense of the man’s day being ‘interrupted’ by the couple. But these final 5 lines are crossed through. In the later draft, the dog now ‘cantilevers up’ onto all fours (the mechanisation of the creature is part of the male group’s malign influence in my mind) – but still no muzzle as such. That only comes via a reference to the man’s gun and, with its proximity to the dog’s head and ears, there is a transference of the word/idea to the dog itself. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t till this point that I thought of calling the poem ‘Muzzle’ and that I also wanted the word to apply to the walking couple who have been (by the experience, by their apprehension, if not their genuine fear) muted or muzzled themselves. The idea was actually there early on; the first draft briefly sketched in, ‘no human voice we do not talk’.

Q2 – The refrain ‘not at us’ is repeated, and echoes again in ‘not for us’ – amongst the ‘white flags’, and the reassurances of safety, there appears a growing threat to the speaker. The reader is left with the feeling that somehow this danger extends beyond the shooting party, and beyond bloodsports. Did you seek for the poem to act as a wider allegorical foreboding, and, if so, would you elaborate on the metaphor? 

MC: Yes, the ‘not at us’ phrase or versions of it are already in the first draft, indeed on four occasions. This is one of the main sources of the idea of ‘division’ in the poem. It’s a simple ‘us’ and ‘them’ situation. The white flags – I think these would simply be the shooting-party’s beaters’ flags being waved to move the birds across the field into the woods, or possibly they are genuinely ‘monitory’ (meaning simply to warn or admonish), but in being white they also have (ironic) resonances of surrender (these guys were not going to surrender anything). The repeating phrase emphasises the gulf between the two elements of the encounter and particularly the sense (clear on the actual occasion) that those holding guns did not seem much concerned that unsuspecting, endangered walkers might be near at hand. We felt ignored; they seemed not to look at us. Being England, there is a strong class element here, which does not map easily onto the question of the voting intentions by class in the Brexit referendum, but factions on all sides seemed not to be paying much attention to any other. The devastating Tory defeat of 2024 should be regarded as reflecting much of this: eventually the country at large felt those in government were simply not paying any attention ‘to us’. I’ve always been pleased with the adjective ‘established’ to describe the shooting-party’s positioning, their being arrayed as the ‘establishment’. The finished poem ends ambivalently. The walking couple escape the shooting-party but are faced with another threatening situation: the gun, the dog. The ‘guard-like’ posture now puts me in mind of prison camp patrols the world over and I’d be happy for readers to get there too: there is a policing of freedoms going on here, a sliding scale from rural pastimes, to political enforcement, to genocidal pograms.

Q3 – ‘Muzzle’ zigzags, indents, retraces its steps. Some stanzas loop longer, and when the final sestet ends abruptly, without full stop, the reader becomes aware of the absence of punctuation throughout. You have a very idiosyncratic approach to presenting and punctuating the poem – could you share your intentions in this poem, and elaborate on whether these ally or counter your conventional style?

MC: The final form of the poem – which you describe so well – came very late. Most often my poems ‘find’ their own form – they don’t begin with any sense of the shape they will eventually take. The 2020 draft was coming out in tercets and I remember liking the ‘walking pace’, step by step, which that shape suggested. But in the end I wanted the poem to be more radical, to suggest a sense of freedom (in contrast to what is felt by the couple during the incident), a freedom to roam as it were, for lines to wander across the page and back again, while also acknowledging that this meandering might well yield some uneasiness in the reader (where’s he going?!). Both freedom and anxiety would be appropriate here. The form and the absence of punctuation (the latter I have been working with for several years now) are intended to generate some ambiguity. For example, I’m hoping for a fluidity in the opening lines, with the putative subject or focus being the flag-waving men, eliding to the walking couple – the ‘you’, then the ‘I’ – the birds, the leaves turning, finally to the ‘grizzle-headed men’. Within this fluency, a bit later, I want several adjectives to be hovering between subjects. The word ‘unconsidered’ floats between the lack of consideration given to the couple and the waiting circle of parked cars. Similarly, ‘impatient unscathed’ buzzes between the couple (again) and the waiting man and dog. This culminates in the rattling throat in the final line which (I want) to be as much about the man as the dog itself and so the ‘discipline’ demanded of the situation ought to be seen as human as much as canine. I guess I’m trying for fertile ambiguities, trying to suggest two things at once. The opening of the Daodejing says: ‘the path I can put a name to / cannot take me the whole way’ (my version).

Q4 – The shooting party negatively influences their surroundings, their presence ‘Hanging’ and ‘spoiling’ the woods, and the walk of the speaker. How much familiarity do you have with these ‘grizzle-headed men’, and do any occasions, such as the one in ‘Muzzle’ stand out as memorable, or significant? 

MC: As you suggest, I have allowed the shooting-party to be, and remain, those wearing the black hats. More often than not I feel the need, the wish, to revisit such emphatic designations: what’s to be said ‘on the other hand’ (ever the wishy-washy liberal). The jaw-dropping presumption of the shooters in the original incident (the poem says pretty much exactly what happened), coupled with the generally felt anger and dividedness of the UK at the time (and since) goes to explain why I have not done so here. Do I know people like this? I guess not. A remote acquaintance likes to share his stories of attending such exciting shooting-parties, but it’s hard even to find the language to create much common ground. Perhaps I am just too urban, metropolitan even. About hunting wild animals, Rilke says, ‘to kill is one form of our restless grief’ (Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 11; my translation). Nothing I witnessed on that day in 2016 served to convince me otherwise; the taking out of another living thing for no useful purpose seems to require an arrogant presumption that I cannot get my head around and I find rather terrifying; the ‘monitory’ urgency in the final poem is as much concerned with how this sort of attitude plays out in the political, even in the military, sphere as it is with ‘blood sports’ more narrowly defined.

December 2024

Here’s the direct link to Modron – https://modronmagazine.com/a-poem-and-interview-with-martin-crucefix/


On Revisiting Blockley

martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, teaching, translation, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A rather more personal post than usual, though a poem (an older one of my own) is attached to it. Last week, I spent a few days with family in the beautiful village of Blockley, in the Cotswolds. The weather was very good for late November and we walked a couple of times – from Broadway up the muddy hill to the folly of Broadway Tower (once frequented by William Morris apparently) and around Hailes Abbey (now a ruin, local lore has it that Thomas Cromwell watched the destruction of the Abbey from a nearby hilltop). Blockley itself is near Moreton-in-Marsh, a place almost destroyed by the volume of traffic flowing through it (even in November), where The Bell Inn was once a favourite of JRR Tolkein, and is supposedly the model for The Prancing Pony in The Lord of the Rings. But Blockley, for me at least, had another powerful ghost haunting it.

As a couple, with young children, we stayed in the village over 20 years ago, in one of the original silk weavers cottages built along Park Road, which looks down over the village and valley. The house was owned by a colleague of mine at the time, Laurence Bowkett. He taught Classics and Latin and often spent the summer vacations away on archaeological digs of various kinds. That must have been the situation then as he’d allowed us to use the house in his absence. His early death, within a year or two of this, was a shock to us all. He had no family of his own and I don’t know what happened to the house later. So, fast forward to 2024, and here we are staying in Blockley again, only partly by coincidence. We have always had good memories of the place and (again, partly by an AirB&B chance) we ended up renting an almost identical cottage in the very same terrace above the village. Indeed, maybe it was the same cottage – I couldn’t remember enough of the details. The layout was certainly the same – the front door in off the road, straight into a little front room, a chilly basement kitchen and upstairs two small bedrooms.

Laurence’s was not the first death of a contemporary I knew well, but it greatly affected me and I tried to express something of this in the poem – an elegy – I wrote for him later. It is called ‘The umbrella and the bay tree’ and it mixes memories of him, his enthusiasms (he had a lot of those – all his students loved him for it), with details from my own family life at the time. It opens with an imagined scene, all his teaching colleagues gathered (as we often did then) in the local pub, remembering him in his absence. The ‘laral gods’ – the Lares – are Classical Roman guardian deities. The laurus nobilis refers to a little bay tree I bought after our first stay in Blockley as a thank you gift . . .

x

By seven-thirty, you are with us all

tonight in the gloom of The Washington,

though we omit you from every round.

Powerless as laral gods who gave you

no protection, even laurus nobilis,

x

the bay tree I bought you, proved no use.

x

Our children were at Infant and Junior School at the time and – to be honest – I can’t now remember if the details the poem goes on to mention are truth or fiction. But Laurence was the kind of guy who’d keep his own books in scrupulous order (as he did with his extensive collection of Marvel comics) so the library setting has always felt right . . .

x

Today, I searched 570 and 790,

in the Dewey decimal classification

your fingers ran through a thousand times,

for the facts of death and irrepressible life,

x

as if I looked for you now and you then.

You taught shard-life and careful fieldwork,

the near-dead language of not giving in.

You offered the heroic a modern face,

though death proved the more determined.

x

You understood lives alter what they touch:

a house, a street, a flowering tree,

for those who know us are not struck dumb,

a library unread the moment we die.

They roar like a lantern with our life inside.

x

The idea of lives of the dead altering the lives of those they have touched in life is familiar enough, though I was working on my translations of Rainer Maria Rilke around this time and I’m sure his influence is in here. It is not just the remembering of a friend who has passed away, but also that our own perceptions of ‘a house, a street, a flowering tree’, for want of a better word, spiritualises the material object, giving it a life, a light, an existence, beyond the ordinary. The resurrection of the bugs stomped by my daughter in what follows is probably an allusion to the early primitive computer games the kids used to play in which a failed – hence fatal – leap from a high building would result only in a brief ‘death’ and their 1st person avatar would soon revive and carry on in pursuit of adventure.

x

In Hornsey Central at 570

this morning, I found books to undermine

my daughter’s smiling confidence

that bugs she crushes beneath her shoe

lie dead a while, then revive good as new.

x

At 790, I leafed through life and death

in Ancient Egypt for her older brother:

how they wash their dead in water and oil,

then bind them in linen smeared with gum

and priests wrap lucky charms inside

x

in hope that none will break the seal

till the dead themselves in time of need.

x

The ‘lucky charms’ idea naturally led the poem on to what I myself might place in a good friend’s sarcophagus and gave rise to a list of his multifarious likes and loves, concluding with the heartfelt wish that his (prematurely unhirsute) head might – even in death (though he had no religious belief as far as I know) – remain somehow protected. The image on the underside of Laurence’s umbrella is a truth!

x

Then I’ll wrap Homer for you, Wolves black-

and-gold, your Micra, Marvel, Blockley

and booze, moist, sweet cake for the road,

x

Frederick Leighton, Sir Frankie Howerd,

Wisden, The Smiths and that Italian umbrella

you flourished one day and thundered open –

behold! the Sistine roof appeared

to keep your bald head from the hissing rain.

x

‘The umbrella and the bay tree’ was originally published in An English Nazareth (Enitharmon Press, 2004).