Walking Away is a 25 page chapbook published by Dare-Gale Press in autumn 2025. The collection consists of just four poems – the central, title piece being a longer sequence of modern haiku – in which the poet bids farewell to his mother and father with a heart-breaking tenderness and a cooler eye of observation that pulls no punches. Drawing on the vivid, condensed power of the haiku form, these poems movingly evoke the sadness, the absurdity, even the bitter comedy of the processes of ageing, mortality, and loss.

Review by John Greening / Review by Ian Brinton / Review by Debasish Lahiri

From fumbling attempts to communicate over the internet, to the routines of a family household established over 60 years, to the surreal confusions of a father’s dementia, to perilous falls, and visiting carers, Crucefix explores the tenor of a married couple’s final years and the emotional anguish of a child’s love. The final two poems take us into a care home room compared to Cleopatra’s monument and to the importance of place – Crucefix’s hometown of Trowbridge in Wiltshire – where he imagines walking for one last time with his father’s spirit: ‘hand in hand / as you never did with your own father / (hand in hand as the two of us never did either)’.

Philip Gross – ‘These are despatches from a fond but fearful place – so close to the depths of loved-ones’ old age that we find ourselves dissolving into their world of lost connections, among fragments of sensation and familiar detail, a world almost without time. The spaces between lines and sections in the central sequence are as eloquent as words. Sharply observant of himself as well what’s around him, Martyn Crucefix is an acute but tactful guide to somewhere most of us, at any age, are loath to go’

Masaya Saito, a contemporary master of the haiku form: ‘These poems paint vivid, original images, the juxtaposition of which is often truly masterful. Despite the painful subject matter, Crucefix succeeds in conveying thoughtful reflections, making wry comments, even raising a smile at times. The central sequence of ‘Walking Away’ is a welcome addition to the world of haiku in English’

Here are a few extracts from the central section of modern haiku poems:

On the look-out for your wife

You want to speak to your mother

One is dead to you the other dead

*

You invent a new language

A shrew’s paw in a trap

A bubbling sound in your throat

*

As at a level-crossing

Days pass but no driver no guard’s van

Who are the other passengers?

*

A large print calendar

Days crossed in black have passed

No footprints mark the snow ahead

*

A job on the precision bench

A well-cut lawn

Three boys grew tall and moved away

*

An owl nodding its head

A robin—a ceramic swan

The picture windowsill waits for you

*

Today is much like yesterday

A new care plan

An earnest well-meaning visitor