He has dispensed with full stops and commas. Not being a Crucefix completist, I'm not sure when that happened but it was after Beneath Tremendous Rain and by the time of Hurt. The effect, one might expect, would be to create a seamlessness, dispensing with linguistic furniture to leave the words free of their moorings, and so it does although nowadays I enjoy a full stop.
What it does achieve is some dislocation of expectation, as in The girl who returned to Aix,
one I watched as snug and warm as Richard Dreyfuss
was driven crazy by shapes in his head
ah, you see, so not 'as snug and warm' after all.
The reader can take nothing for granted on first 'encounter', as it were, with the poems. The technique has a disconcerting but creative power to shift to the unexpected even if I'm almost alone in not demanding to be surprised by every poem I ever read. It means that re-reading is re-paid more in these poems than most others although any poem that doesn't warrant more than a second look is not likely to be a good one.
The book is in three parts and the poems towards the end might be the best, in some ways the least abstract, and an alternative strategy to piling all the best work in at the beginning to get off to a convincing start. It's not every time I begin a book of poems at the first page anyway and so such a ploy is less likely to fool me. But Street View, the final poem, is the pick, about the poet finding himself on the internet feature in a sequence of shots, becoming aware of what's happening. In a loose way, it is linked to theme of the 'poetry of modern technology' to a previous poem about a mobile phone in his parents' possession accidentally ringing him up so that he, not wanting to, can overhear their conversation without them knowing.
Things difficult to love and La Giaconda gone are also poems that make immediate appeal. Crucefix is thoughtful and measured and not one for the showy or grand gesture. It is not surprising that he has plenty of competition successes to list in the credits although the details of how many poems were entered and were also-rans in other competitions we never get told in such palmares. One suspects that his finest achievements are his translations of Rilke but you need to be a proper poet to do the translating job with any credibility and he never lets you down, being one of those who have kept contributing to English poetry steadily and conscientiously making it worth being a part of.
