Martyn Crucefix - Hurt

Martyn Crucefix, Hurt (Enitharmon)

One of the first things I did having arrived at Lancaster University in 1979 was get in touch with the editor of the poetry magazine. I was eager to set about the literary world and be involved in what went on. What went on there wasn’t a great deal. Martyn Crucefix had been editing Continuum but now wanted to concentrate on his third year studies so he gave me the magazine on the spot and so I was already the boy in charge.
I might have made a good job of it on my own, or maybe not, but I felt I ought to invite anybody else who was interested to join in and so I ended up with a committee of four, but no unity of purpose. We changed the title to Allusions, opened up the campus magazine to allcomers, held a competition, speculatively solicited work from Betjeman, John Lennon and Naom Chomsky amongst others and got kindly replies and poems from Roger McGough, Iain Crichton-Smith, Brian Patten and others and had the nerve to turn down Gavin Ewart’s contribution. But when the first issue came out it wasn’t everything it might have been. We were down to a committee of three and,after issue 1, two more of us left the other one to get on with it.
It was a sorry episode. But ever since that meeting with Martyn I’ve seen his career go well, with prizes and translations of Rilke and, for some reason being aware that he was born in Trowbridge, think of him every time I go through there on the train.
His first book, Beneath Tremendous Rain, was one I liked a lot and anyone with a collection entitled A Madder Ghost is fine by me.
This new book is belatedly mentioned here because my radar missed it until recently. It appeared last autumn.
The opening poem Invocation repays a few readings but at first I found little to enthuse about, the poems sensitively observed and descriptive but not making a great impression as poetry. The sort of poems that make me wonder how they got written in the first place but some of these poems are more oblique than earlier Crucefix and might reward further looking. The last of the three sections does, however, contain some fine pieces.
Calling in the Dark works on a brilliant conceit, if conceit it is when the story is obviously and simply true. The poet's parents' mobile phone accidentally rings him when knocked in a bag of shopping. Martyn eavesdrops for longer than he might on their private conversation and feels some guilt and responsibility for doing so before terminating the call and one wonders at the double meaning of his title.
Scraps hopes for a better way of looking at cathedrals for his son than the poet had,

So this is what I hope for him:
a stronger belief than I knew,
that the solitary man
in his quietude need not
be scorned and ridiculed,
need not have plagued so bitterly

my boyhood –
The long poem Wilderness is a gentle meditation to end on. Martyn seems to have visited the Keats house in Hampstead during its renovation but his poem on the subject conflates the house now with Keats’ life there and abroad to great effect. But on a different poet, in Petrarch’s Head, the book provides it best moments,

Surely the answer lies with the beautiful Laura,
the girl like an idea you glimpsed one day-
Laura, who took your breath away,
greedy thief and snatched your heart as well,
allowing nothing of herself at all.
ending on the best lines of all,

the poet’s head happy in love’s dark place
and love’s tongue relieved in his embrace.
Yes, it’s another poem about poetry but when they are this good you really don’t mind.

So, perhaps this is a book of three halves but it builds towards some excellent successes and proves worth staying with. It’s good to see that one poet from Lancaster thirty years ago continues to thrive.