More than 10 years of blogging on poetry and translation – over 39,000 views in 2024 – now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive: 'one of the top 10 poetry blogs' (Rogue Strands)
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.
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’.
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.
The invitation at the opening of these two remarkable sequences of poems by Martyn Crucefix emphasises both ‘difference’ and ‘ambiguity’, an ‘othering’ which hones attention rather than dulling it.
Divided into two sections, Works and Days (forty-nine poems) and O, at the Edge of the Gorge (fourteen poems) the two landscapes bring into focus a post-2016 Britain and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy. The leitmotif which threads its pathway, its recurring echo, through the first section is of ‘all the bridges’ being ‘down’ and the epigraph to section two is a quotation from Canto 16 of Dante’s Paradiso in which cities pass out of existence through warfare or disease and that which may have seemed permanent is continuously in movement. That second section of poems is a sequence of sonnets and in the final one the hawk’s resting place in the ‘shivering of poplars’ sways so that he is neither falling nor at ease
with these thinnest of airs beneath him
these shapes of loose knotted mesh
these whisperings that cradle him on a whim
That ‘othering’ prompts the poet to see the differences that are ‘like crimes woven into the weft’ and, in a way that William Blake would have recognised in his ‘A Poison Tree’, envy can be ‘buried long years in the black heart / of expressed admiration’ and ‘sunshine’ can be ‘really the withering of night’ which is ‘poured into soil where wheat grows’. And so it is—‘in and around and over and above’ because ‘all the bridges are down’.
In April 2007 Jeremy Prynne wrote some notes for students about poems and translation:
Translation is for sure a noble art, making bridges for readers who want to cross the divide between their own culture and those cultures which are situated in other parts of the world; and yet a material bridge is passive and inert, without any life of its own, whereas a poetic translator must try to make a living construction with its own energy and powers of expression, to convey the active experience of a foreign original text.
As a translator of real distinction (Rilke’s Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus) Crucefix has for many years made these living constructions offering readers a gateway into new experiences whether it be through the world of Laozi’s Daodejing (Enitharmon Press, 2016) or through these new poems which offer echoes both of Hesiod’s Work and Days and the poems known as a vacanna which originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10-12th century India. His understanding of the central role language plays in our lives, that creation of bridges between humans, was one of the deeply moving and memorable moments in his collection from Seren in 2017, The Lovely Disciplines. There the poem ‘Words and things’ presented an elderly individual who discovered ‘too late this absence of words’ which now ‘builds a prison’ and Crucefix recognised that ‘a man without language is no man’: as the world of objects becomes too difficult to dominate he can only have knowledge of a world which ‘turns in your loosening grip’. The echo of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ is surely no accidental one!
Translations are bridges, language is a bridge, and the distressing recognition of isolation within numbers is the dominant image in ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ from the first section of this new book:
fifteen kilometres of traffic wait before us
behind us the infinite tail
x
we are offered Google Map options
yet those trumpeted ten minute economies
x
are nothing till they can be proved
you make a choice you go your own way –
x
this has been better said before of course –
you cannot take the other way
x
and remain a unitary being on two paths
or perhaps sane – all roads crawl north
x
because multiple millions of cars crawl north
because all the bridges are down
Those ten minute trumpetings bring the world of Orwell’s 1984 to my mind as loud announcements of positive news seem to possess a tinny emptiness to the understanding of the isolated human who exists in a world of no bridges.
However, in contrast to this wave of uniformity one reads moments of ‘othering’ in the second section of this book as in ‘sharpening gusts along the valley floor’ a scrap of air was birthed
whirling inches above a littered drain
in a back street of some hilltop town
x
like Urbisaglia or some place that has seen
and has survived change of use
from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse
and no gully nor hill can stop it
In this moving world ‘great swathes of air’ gather strength to flex ‘all things to a scurrying to keep up / and the truth is some will and some will fail’.
In a poem titled ‘can you imagine’ (for my children) from the first section of Between a Drowning Man the power of language to translate the invisible onto the page is presented with an unerring eye focussed upon reality. In a world in which he no longer shares the companionship of others the poet is carried safely because although ‘you find the bridges between us fallen down’ and although ‘you mourn’ you can still ‘imagine’. That sense of continuity held in the imagination is far from the image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey, in 2015 whose death was recorded by Crucefix’s earlier book, Cargo of Limbs, from Hercules Editions in 2019. The boy’s family had fled from the war engulfing Syria in the hope of joining relatives in the safety of Canada and became ‘part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time’:
In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.
In this new book that ‘whim’ of a resting place for the hawk, those ‘whisperings’ prompt the bird, the poet, ‘to call it yet more steady perhaps’:
Many thanks to Mat Riches for this fulsome and acute reading of my recent collection from Salt Publishing. The review first appeared onThe High Window – Jan 2024
The introduction to the first section of Between a Drowning Man states that it draws on two texts. The first is Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the second of which is described as
the type of poem known as a vacanna originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10-12th century India. using plain language, repetition and refrain they were written to praise the god, Siva, though also expressed a great deal of personal anger, puzzlement, even despair about the human condition […]
This helped put everything into context for what followed. One third of the way in I started to think of it as a man shouting at clouds in book form, of someone railing at things in the world that are beyond our control. And maybe it is all of this, but it also much more than this. I think it becomes a lesson in acceptance.
In a post on his own Blog, Crucefix describes these poems as starting to arrive after reading the vacanna poems in 2016, and how the poems began to accumulate after that while ‘staying in Keswick at the time and I vividly remember scribbling down brief pieces at all times of the day and night’ and of having been influenced by Brexit (the bridges are down indeed). However, he also describes in a follow up post that:
I thought of the poetry I was writing as a quite narrowly focused topical intervention, but in the last 4 or 5 years …the poems have come to seem less dependent on their times and more capable of being read as a series of observations – and passionate pleas – for a more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture.
And while the Brexit reading is there, these poems speak more to grounding a modern and disconnected world (despite plenty of references to devices for and modes of communication—we’ll come back to that shortly) in timeless themes like love and desire, parenting, ageing, joy in nature, false idols, and much more, and this is just in the first twenty or so pages.
Picking one of those themes at random, we can see how false idols are covered, but also how deftly he weaves in modern references to something that is both timeless, and of its time, and with that very human. In ‘the six pack on the side’ we are told:
the clock is a sinister and impassive god for the ancients rumour was a kind of god …
the god of WiFi when we curse its absence and when did difference become a god
We have always been a narcissistic species that pays attention to gossip (‘rumour was a kind of god’), but while our gods have changed as the centuries have passed, we still curse our gods when they forsake us. Not a bad return for a 19-line poem in my opinion.
In order to achieve the ‘more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture’ we can see several pleas for more open lines of communication throughout the poems. Some are located in the specific and familial, as in ‘watch the child’ and its discussion of a child chattering away to herself in a coffee shop with her ‘bright picture book’ juxtaposed with ‘her mother at her cooling latte / at her macchiato / at her cooling skinny medium cappuccino // […] her mother’s ears wired casually // with two scarlet buds.
The child is broadcasting and communicating in a carefree way vs the mother’s more deliberate inward-looking approach, a shutting the world out for some respite. And while this could be a judgmental poem; it’s not. It feels like an invitation to consider both sides, both needs here. The refrain of ‘all the bridges are down’ lands particularly well here, both for the protagonists of the poem, but also for the reader.
However, while some pleas are located in the specific there are some more general ones to be found. In ‘he thought of this time’ one man recounts a litany of disappointments and emotions from his father. The poem draws from Hesiod and his idea of the fifth age where modern man was created by Zeus to be evil, selfish, weary, and burdened with sorrow. It’s a two-footed tackle on humanity from the whistle:
he thought of this time as a fifth age that he’d be better off dead or not yet born working all day he would fear the night had heard of children born prematurely grey and the fraying bond between fathers and sons between mothers and daughters between host and guest between different races
It continues without reprieve about a world where:
[…]the hopeless are advanced and further advancement lavished for no more than just chancing it respect a word more spoken than heard the educated full of corrosive cleverness and compassion the greatest of virtues an ebbing tide you see where it glints on the horizon
At the time of writing, it’s easy to feel like these lines are as contemporary as it’s possible to be, and yet it’s arguable they are evergreen observations about humanity. However, I suspect that’s the point.
We’ve touched upon references to modern-day totems like WiFi, coffee types and headphones already, but this section is filled with them. Further examples include references to Google Maps and ‘five-star online reviews’ in ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ and ‘stoke a fire under your silk blouse’ respectively.
This all reaches its zenith in the final poem of the section, ‘this morning round noon’. The poem moves from personal notes about scattering ashes, a son’s birthday (and him being in huge debt at 21, one presumes from being at university) through to:
an American punk band form Nashville posting abuse about a young Buddhist woman refusing anaesthetic
The lines are punctuated by phrases like ‘likesharelike’ or ‘likeclicklike’ or ‘smileyfaceicon’. It’s the diaristic nature of the whole section writ large and transmitting thoughts to the page (albeit the printed page, not the Facebook page) as they occur. As an aside, this running together of words, coupled with the entire book’s distinct and clearly deliberate lack of punctuation (save a few dashes here and there) add to the observational nature of the poems, of thoughts being pulled from the ether. However, this is very much not to say that these poems aren’t considered and crafted—they very much are.
The final line of the poem and section is ‘I say the Pantone chart is one of my favourite things’, and while the poem that proceeds this line could be read as a darker version of the Sound of Music classic, less Raindrops on roses and more ‘I was hit by a car likeshare’, but I prefer to take it as a sign that the poem end on acceptance of nuance, variation and being able to communicate the same needs.
As the first section comes to an end there are two poems where the last line of one resurfaces as the start of the next, and it feels like a teaser for what follows in the second section, O. at the Edge of the Gorge.
This was previously published as a pamphlet by Guillemot Press in 2017 and is a crown of sonnets. After the hectic modernity of the first section, there is much to be said for the relative calm of following a traveller, Orpheus, on a journey through Italian countryside observing ‘Glossy fleet black clods of carpenter bees / swirl at the corner of the house / then sink onto spindly lavender stems / alight on blooms stooped // with the weight of insect lives’.
It’s a beautiful opening and a beautiful image that should perhaps be filmed and used as a fine example of what was briefly known as slow TV and shown on BBC4, but in the second poem he describes ‘astronomical time marked by light’ as the sun descends the gorge and church bells tolling, but:
yet come nightfall a different sense these same sounds sound notes more chilling…
A very real sense of for whom the bell tolls, indeed. As the traveller wends their way round the area, taking notes and sketches of birds, a ‘flock of white doves’, that darkness returns in the form of a buzzard in the eighth sonnet, and gets deeper still in the ninth where he mentions:
like Urbisaglia or some place has seen and survived change of use from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse and no gully nor hill can stop it
Urbisaglia is an ancient town in Mid-East Italy that became the site of an internment camp during the second world war, and that knowledge adds further weight to the stanza that begins sonnet ten:
The truth is some survive a while most fail to conceive the scale of paperwork to follow change of use from church to temple next to slaughterhouse.
The cruelty of humanity to itself is mirrored in the “bloody festival / of the bird” in sonnet thirteen as it discusses a raptor above the gorge, and the final sonnet off this crown muses on the fragility of life:
All creatures die sooner blind to the hawk— left clutching no more than this as if the hammock he occupies each and all night too as if strung out
[…] not falling yet not ever at ease
‘not ever at ease’ could so easily be a final motif for the whole collection. There is a sense that the learnings of this collection are hard won, but there is a connection to the wider world to be had, and that we can find comfort in travelling through it. The final lines of ‘you are not in search of’ in the first section seem apt as a place to leave it:
you might say this aloud—by way of ritual— there goes one who thought much of life
who found joy in return for a little gratitude.
Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence. Recent work has been in Wild Court, The New Statesman, The Friday Poem, Bad Lilies, Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings. A pamphlet called Collecting the Data is out via Red Squirrel Press. Twitter @matriches Blog: Wear The Fox Hat
Stuart Henson has also written a fine review of Between a Drowning Man, which has recently been posted on the London Grip site. You can read the whole review here:
I’m very pleased to announce that Mark McGuinness’ excellent poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air, which has recently featured poets such as Mona Arshi, Judy Brown, Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig, Mimi Khalvati, Clare Pollard, Tom Sastry, and Denise Saul, has recorded a discussion about my new Salt collection, Between a Drowning Man.
Mark’s method is to focus on one particular poem and between us we chose the poem ‘you are not in search of’, on page 57 of the new book, from the latter end of the ‘Works and Days’ sequence. You can listen to the podcast here. It’s about 40 minutes in length and includes a reading of the poem at the beginning and end. There is also a helpful transcription of our discussion.
Here is the poem text – though without the indents which are hard to reproduce here:
Last week, with the imminent arrival of my new book of poems, Between a Drowning Man, I decided it would be useful – for those who would like to know – if I re-blogged a piece I wrote and posted early in 2019 about one of the key sources and inspirations of the new book’s main sequence of poems called ‘Works and Days’. The focus then was on my reading of AK Ramanujan’s collection of vacana poems. But later in the process of completing the full sequence, it was further formed (or reformed or deformed) by rather different pressures derived from a second literary antecedent, the reading of which was itself influenced by the febrile and divided atmosphere surrounding political events in the UK between 2016 and 2019. I mean, of course, Brexit.
At the time, I thought of the poetry I was writing as a quite narrowly focused topical intervention, but in the last 4 or 5 years (partly with the greater clarity with which the Brexit heist can be now seen to have been foisted on the country), the poems have come to seem less dependent on their times and more capable of being read as a series of observations – and passionate pleas – for a more generous, open-minded, less extremist, less egotistical UK culture. It was Hesiod’s pre-Homeric poem, Works and Days, that suddenly felt oddly familiar: in it he is not harking back to an already lost era, nor to past heroic (in our case imperial) events. Instead, Hesiod talks about his own, contemporary workaday world, offering advice to his brother because the pair of them seem to be in some sort of a dispute with each other (a squabble over limited resources – that sounded familiar).
So my developing sequence took over from Hesiod the idea of familial disputes, the importance of the persistence of Hope (in the Pandora’s jar story), the idea that we need to understand that we are living in an Age of Iron (not idealised Gold). Poetry can never be summarised by its own conclusions but the poems seemed to me to be arguing the need to work hard – to have patience – not to buy into fairy tales of a recoverable golden age that probably never existed anyway. If all this sounds interesting, do click on the blog title below to read the whole of my original post. After a bit of New Year 2019 preamble, the discussion of Hesiod begins at paragraph 3.
My first public reading of these poems from my new book will be on the evening of Tuesday 24th October at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. I’ll be reading alongside 2 other Salt poets: Elisabeth Sennitt-Clough – ‘My Name is Abilene’ (Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize); and Becky Varley-Winter – ‘Dangerous Enough’ (‘daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world’).
With the arrival of my new book of poems, Between a Drowning Man, imminent, I thought it would be useful to re-blog a piece I wrote and posted early in 2019 about one of the key sources and inspirations of the new book’s main sequence of poems called ‘Works and Days’. It was my fortuitous reading of AK Ramanujan’s collection of vacana poems, early in 2016 (all explained below), that set me off experimenting with a similar clipped, plain, rapid, fluid style with its (refrain like) repetitions. I was staying in Keswick at the time and I vividly remember scribbling down brief pieces at all times of the day and night. Outside, and interfering with the various walking expeditions we had planned, the great storm of the winter of 2015/6 (googling it now, it was Storm Desmond) had taken out many of the ancient bridges in the Cumbrian countryside. Inevitably, this fact found its way into the poems and provided the refrain I used in many of them.
It has been a long haul between that period and the poems’ eventual appearance in this new collection and the whole sequence was further formed (or reformed or deformed) by pressures of a second literary antecedent (I’ll blog about that next week) and by the divisive political events in the UK between 2016 and 2019. Click on the blog title below to read the whole of the original post. My first public reading from the new book will be on the evening of Tuesday 24th October at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. I’ll be reading alongside 2 other Salt poets: Elisabeth Sennitt-Clough – ‘My Name is Abilene’ (Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize); and Becky Varley-Winter – ‘Dangerous Enough’ (‘daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world’).
‘An ‘Autumn Journal’ for our times.’ —Nancy Campbell
‘Each poem is such a thoughtful space to enter. Crucefix’s skill at managing sequences is stunning. In language that arrests, disturbs, and provokes reflection, each poem refracts and reflects the whole. By examining contemporary life in all its flawed difficulty, including ‘how we other everything/ and everyone we meet’, these poems call for us to witness how our vulnerability isolates and unites us, and ultimately to ‘lay down difference’. —Heidi Williamson
‘[The poems] have the urgency and the hurt we perhaps require now, it is good for poetry to speak up when it is compelled to do so, at times like this and in this way’ —Stephen Romer
Listen to Martyn discussing the background and the writing of the poems in this new collection in these two podcasts:
BLURB OF THIS BOOK: Martyn Crucefix’s new collection of poems traces the forensic unfolding of two landscapes – contemporary Britain post-2016 and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy. Both places are vividly evoked – the coffee shops, traffic tailbacks, shopping malls, tourist-dotted hillsides and valleys of modern Britain appear in stark contrast to the hilltop villages, church spires, deep gorges, natural history and Classical ruins of Italy. Both landscapes come to represent psychic journeys: closer to home there is division everywhere – depicted in both tragic and comic detail – that only a metaphorical death of the self seems likely to counteract. Closer to the Mediterranean, the geographical and personal, or romantic, divisions are also shown ultimately to offer possibilities of transcendence.
The poems of the longer sequence, ‘Works and Days’, are startlingly free-wheeling, allusive – brilliantly deploying source materials and inspiration from Hesiod’s original and the 10/12th century Indian vacana poems – all bound together by the repeated refrain of bridges breaking down. The Italian poems, as a crown of sonnets, are more formally controlled, but the repeating of first and last lines of the individual poems likewise serves to suggest the presence of an overarching unity.
In the end, both sequences travel towards death which – while not denying the reality of human mortality, the passage of time – is intended to represent a challenge to the powerful dividing walls between Thee and Me, the liberation of empathetic feeling, even the Daoist erasure of the assumed gulf between self and not-self: ‘these millions of us aspiring to the condition / of ubiquitous dust on the fiery water’.
Martyn Crucefix 