Martyn Crucefix (born 1956 inTrowbridge, Wiltshire) is a British poet, translator and reviewer. Published predominantly byEnitharmon Press, his work ranges widely from vivid and tender lyrics to writing that pushes the boundaries of the extended narrative poem. His themes encompass questions of history and identity (particularly in the 1997 collectionA Madder Ghost) and – influenced by his translations ofRainer Maria Rilke – more recent work focuses on the transformations of imagination and momentary epiphanies. His new translation of Rilke'sSonnets to Orpheus was published by Enitharmon in the autumn of 2012. Most recent publication isThe Time We Turned published by Shearsman Books in 2014.
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Crucefix attendedTrowbridge Boys' High School, then spent a year studying medicine atGuy's Hospital Medical School, before switching to take a degree in English literature atLancaster University. He completed a D.Phil. atWorcester College, Oxford, writing on the poetry ofPercy Bysshe Shelley and Enlightenment and Romantic theories of language. He teaches in North London and is married to Louise Tulip. They have two children.
Crucefix has won numerous prizes including anEric Gregory Award[1] and a Hawthornden Fellowship.[2] Among his several original collections are:Beneath Tremendous Rain (Enitharmon, 1990);[3]At the Mountjoy Hotel (Enitharmon, 1993);[4]On Whistler Mountain (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994);A Madder Ghost (Enitharmon, 1997);[5]An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004);[6]Hurt (Enitharmon, 2010).[7] His translation ofRainer Maria Rilke'sDuino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006)[8] was shortlisted for the 2007Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as "unlikely to be bettered for very many years" (Magma)[9] and by the Popescu judges as "a milestone of translation and a landmark in European poetry".[10]
An early selection of Crucefix's work secured an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and appeared inThe Gregory Poems: The Best of the Young British Poets 1983–84, edited and chosen byJohn Fuller andHoward Sergeant.[11] His first book,Beneath Tremendous Rain (Enitharmon, 1990) was published two years after he had been featured by Peter Forbes in a "New British Poets" edition ofPoetry Review. This collection contains his elegy for his friend, the poet and food writer,Jeremy Round, as well as the four-part poem "Water Music" and an extended meditation on language, love and history titled "Rosetta". ForHerbert Lomas the book showed "Great intelligence and subtlety . . . clearly an outstanding talent from whom great things can be expected".[12]Anne Stevenson wrote: "Poetry these days, often feels obliged to place conscience over art and make language work for precision, not complexity. In Martyn Crucefix's first collection, something else happens . . . daring to break with secular convention, Crucefix will become a real artist".[13]
During a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1990, Crucefix completed the long poem, "At The Mountjoy Hotel", which went on to win second prize in the Arvon Poetry Competition 1991 (the poem was approvingly judged “controversial” bySelima Hill, one of the selection panel that also includedAndrew Motion) and was published as a short-run pamphlet by Enitharmon in 1993.[4] It was also included in Crucefix's second collection,On Whistler Mountain (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), opening the book which also contained a second long narrative poem, "On Whistler Mountain". This second piece carries the dates New Year 1991 – New Year 1993 and splices putative personal events with material from theFirst Gulf War, in particular the "turkey-shoot" of the US air attack on Iraqi forces on the highway north ofAl Jahra.Tony Harrison's poem "A Cold Coming" (1991) refers to the same incident.Poetry Review thought the book proved Crucefix "one of the most mature voices of the 1990s"[14] and it was praised byTim Liardet: "Crucefix is at his best, bringing physical truths faithfully into an intense focus whilst remaining alive to their more outlandish implications, their capacity for dream-making . . . . tendering poems of love and desire with great delicacy of gesture and movement . . . blending an earthy sensuality with fine cerebral observation".[15]Alan Brownjohn, writing inThe Sunday Times characterised it as a "substantial and rewarding collection . . . highly wrought, ambitious, thoughtful".[16]
A third collection,A Madder Ghost (Enitharmon, 1997), drew on material unearthed in genealogical research ten years earlier. This had revealed that Crucefix's ancestors to be ofHuguenot origins, fleeing France in the 1780s to settle inSpitalfields, London, to continue the family trade of clock-making. The book's tripartite structure opens and closes with sequences of fluent, lightly punctuated lyrics in which he explores the anxieties and anticipated pleasures of fatherhood, from conception through the first year of his son's life. Genealogical material forms the middle section and looks to the past for identity, continuity and new ways of understanding the present in atour de force of narrative interweaving that Vrona Groarke described as "a brave experiment . . . allowing two languages distanced by history and syntax, to swim together in single poems".[17] The book was praised byAnne Stevenson: "It is rare these days to find a book of poems that is so focused, so carefully shaped and so moving".[18] Kathryn Maris also praised it as "urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful"[19] andGillian Allnutt thought the poems timely in their engagement with "proactive fatherhood" in ways that were "tender, humorous and . . . profound".[20]
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