This review of my recent Dare-Gale Press chapbook, Walking Away, has just appeared on Litter Magazine website. Many thanks to Ian Brinton for his insightful observations on what he calls ‘this important little volume’. Any kind of proximity to Ben Jonson, Vladimir Nabokov and WS Graham is good with me!

‘Language most shewes a man: speake that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us, and is the Image of the Parent of it, the mind’

Ben Jonson’s prose Discoveries was first printed in 1640 and the shining clarity of what these words offer is central to what we understand about the importance of language. No one person can read the mind of another and it is language that permits us to recognise what is going on in another person’s vision of the world. As Martyn Crucefix bids a farewell to his parents he recognises in the title poem to this deeply-moving sequence that ‘Walking Away’ leaves a world behind:

      Chaos of a dissolving township
      A vacant heathland

      I’ve no map to your mind

The twenty pages of poetry in this beautifully produced chapbook are dedicated ‘in memory of my parents’ and open with an epigraph from Masaya Saito’s Snow Bones which had been published by Isobar Press in 2016. Saito’s four narrative haiku sequences had also been dedicated to his parents and far from being lamentations of stasis they were delicate records of movement as the poet prepared to leave a landscape in which much of his past had resided:

      In the snow country
      my parents gone

      a pendulum swinging

The print on the white pages of Saito’s volume appears like footsteps in snow and there is a quiet seriousness in the sound of one of the seven different voices as it outlines

      A misty night

      I exist
      as footsteps

In Martyn Crucefix’s volume there is a humble awareness of the passing of time which does not resolve itself into an easily achieved sense of regret. If the connection between the Then and the Now wavers with time’s passing and ‘faces split to stained glass / or cubist fragments or fairground mirrors’ those human figures so close to the poet are ‘still talking blithely asking me still / if I can see these crocuses.’ The repeated use of the word ‘still’ conveys both a settled sense of the past being beyond us, unmoving, and the enduring quality of its presence.

The central poem in this sequence is made up of fifty-eight three-line haikus and the ironies of absence and presence are held with a quiet sense of the bowed head:

      Something where nothing was
      Nothing where something stood

      Ten thousand nothings

In the riddle of all riddles nothing is an actual something and if you look at zero you will see nothing but if you use it as an eye you will see the world. The circular hollows of nothing may range from an open mouth to the faintly outline dark of the moon and from craters to wounds. As it was suggested by Nabokov ‘Skulls and seeds and all good things are round.’

      A large print calendar
      Days crossed in black have passed

      No footprints mark the snow ahead

As W.S. Graham’s ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’ puts it ‘footprint on foot / Print, word on word’ is ‘always a record of me in you’ and in ‘Walking Away’ Martyn Crucefix questions his dead parents

      Why show me these photographs?
      You point to strangers

      Once upon a time I was there

In the final poem in this important little volume, ‘In This Quiet One-way West Country Town’,  the vivid sense of loss is caught as ‘your hand slips mine before I’ve the chance / to say I’m sorry I was not there to help’ and the poet is left

      under cloudless skies a gull driven too far
      inland to return now it’s closing time
      all across this quiet provincial one-way
      west country town turning for home before dark

Home is where we live and the footprints left in snow, marks upon the page, remain as a reminder of who we are in relation to how we got there.