Everybody’s Reviewing

Another Review of my recent chapbook ‘Walking Away’

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

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

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

           Only present participles

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

           Mother of your brother and sister
           Mother of your three sons

           The same car speeding away

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

           Dining chair and coffee table 
           Shifted here and there


           Losing you. Your balance too

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

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

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

New Review of ‘Between a Drowning Man’ – from Shanta Acharya

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We all know that reviews of poetry books can take a long time to filter through whatever system they do come through. But then they always come as a pleasant surprise (if that’s not making too many assumptions about their likely contents). Any way – almost 12 months after the appearance of my most recent full collection, Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023), the ever-lively site, Everybody’s Reviewing, has just posted a detailed and insightful commentary on the book by poet and novelist, Shanta Acharya.

Amongst other things, the review comments: ‘A poet, translator, reviewer and poetry blogger, Martyn Crucefix has won prizes for his poetry and translation. As a translator of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Laozi’s Daodejing, Huchel’s These Numbered Days, among others, Crucefix has been building bridges for those who want to cross the divide between cultures, countries, ways of seeing the world and each other. Words are bridges, language itself a bridge – yet we inhabit an increasingly complex world where loneliness and isolation are on the rise. In ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ an acceptance of this isolation is disconcerting: ‘you make a choice you go your own way … / because all the bridges are down.’ His understanding of the central role language plays in our lives, that creation of bridges between humans, is a fundamental aspect of his work’.

Here’s a link to the full review

And coincidentally, Seren Books have also just recently posted a rather older poem of mine in their Poem of the Week slot. This is from my 2017 collection with Seren, The Lovely Disciplines. It’s about visiting the opticians for a check-up – though also about the desire (my desire) for clarity and absoluteness (if there is such a word), a desire, of course, never to be fulfilled. Read the full poem here.