Martyn Crucefix (born 1956 in Trowbridge, Wiltshire) is a British poet, translator and reviewer. Published predominantly by Enitharmon 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 collection A Madder Ghost) and – influenced by his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke – more recent work focuses on the transformations of imagination and momentary epiphanies. His new translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus was published by Enitharmon in the autumn of 2012. Most recent publication is The Time We Turned published by Shearsman Books in 2014.
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Crucefix attended Trowbridge Boys' High School, then spent a year studying medicine at Guy's Hospital Medical School, before switching to take a degree in English literature at Lancaster University. He completed a D.Phil. at Worcester College, Oxford, writing on the poetry of Percy 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 an Eric Gregory Award [1] and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published 6 original collections: Beneath Tremendous Rain (Enitharmon, 1990); [2] At the Mountjoy Hotel (Enitharmon, 1993); [3] On Whistler Mountain (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994); A Madder Ghost (Enitharmon, 1997); [4] An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004); [5] Hurt (Enitharmon, 2010). [6] His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) [7] was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as "unlikely to be bettered for very many years" (Magma) [8] and by the Popescu judges as "a milestone of translation and a landmark in European poetry". [9]
An early selection of Crucefix's work secured an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and appeared in The Gregory Poems: The Best of the Young British Poets 1983–84, edited and chosen by John Fuller and Howard Sergeant. [10] 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 of Poetry 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'. For Herbert Lomas the book showed "Great intelligence and subtlety . . . clearly an outstanding talent from whom great things can be expected". [11] 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". [12]
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” by Selima Hill, one of the selection panel that also included Andrew Motion) and was published as a short-run pamphlet by Enitharmon in 1993. [3] 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 the First Gulf War, in particular the 'turkey-shoot' of the US air attack on Iraqi forces on the highway north of Al 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" [13] and it was praised by Tim 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". [14] Alan Brownjohn, writing in The Sunday Times wrote of it as a "substantial and rewarding collection . . . highly wrought, ambitious, thoughtful". [15]
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 of Huguenot origins, fleeing France in the 1780s to settle in Spitalfields, 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 a tour 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". [16] The book was praised by Anne Stevenson: "It is rare these days to find a book of poems that is so focused, so carefully shaped and so moving". [17] Kathryn Maris also praised it as "urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful" [18] and Gillian Allnutt thought the poems timely in their engagement with "proactive fatherhood" in ways that were "tender, humorous and . . . profound". [19]
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva died by suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
Anne Stevenson was an American-British poet and writer and recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
Michael Longley,, is an Irish poet.
Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire.
Kent Johnson was an American poet, translator, critic, and anthologist. His work, much of it meta-fictional and/or satirical in approach, has provoked a notable measure of controversy and debate within English-language poetry circles.
Edward A. Snow is an American poet and translator.
Peter Riley is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group loosely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important center of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor to The English Intelligencer. He is the author of ten books of poetry, and many small-press booklets. He is also the current poetry editor of the Fortnightly Review and a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award in 2012 for "achievement and distinction in poetry".
Jeremy Hooker FRSL FLSW is an English poet, critic, teacher, and broadcaster. Central to his work are a concern with the relationship between personal identity and place.
Simon Perchik was an American poet who has been described by Library Journal as, "the most widely published unknown poet in America." Perchik worked as an attorney before his retirement in 1980. Educated at New York University, he later resided in East Hampton, New York. Best known for his highly personal, non-narrative style of poetry, Perchik's work has appeared in over 30 books, websites including Verse Daily, Jacket and numerous print magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Partisan Review, The Nation, North American Review, Weave Magazine, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, and CLUTCH. His poetry collection, Hands Collected was longlisted for the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry.
Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born poet, novelist, biographer and literary critic.
Christopher Whyte is a Scottish poet, novelist, translator and critic. He is a novelist in English, a poet in Scottish Gaelic, the translator into English of Marina Tsvetaeva, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Maria Rilke, and a critic of Scottish and international literature. His work in Gaelic appears under the name Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin.
Enitharmon Press is an independent British publishing house specialising in artists’ books, poetry, limited editions and original prints.
Duino Castle is a fourteenth-century fortification located in the village of Duino, located in the municipality of Duino-Aurisina, near Trieste, modern-day Italy, on the cliffs overlooking the Gulf of Trieste.
Myra Schneider is a British poet. She grew up in Scotland, London, and Sussex and read English at London University. She has worked for an educational publisher and as a teacher in a comprehensive school and a tutor to people with literacy problems, as well as working for many years with severely disabled adults. She lives in London with her husband, a retired computer consultant, and they have one son.
Jeremy Round (1957–1989) was a cookery writer and journalist for The Independent newspaper, feted by food lovers from Elizabeth David to Marco Pierre White. The only book he published before his untimely death in 1989 was The Independent Cook. It was re-issued in 2001 and chosen as 38th in the 50 best cookbooks of all time as selected by The Observer Food Monthly team in 2010
Tom Rawling (1916–1996) was a teacher, angler and late-developing poet who wrote what Peter Porter called some of the "most unforced collections of nature poems for some years". His favoured subject was the Ennerdale valley in the English Lake District where he grew up in the early twentieth century.
Ágnes Lehóczky is a Hungarian poet, academic and translator born in Budapest, 1976.
Mario Petrucci is a British poet, literary translator, educator and broadcaster. He was born in Lambeth, London and trained as a physicist at Selwyn College in the University of Cambridge, later completing a PhD in vacuum crystal growth at University College London. He is also an ecologist, having a BA in Environmental Science from Middlesex University. Petrucci was the first poet to be resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. He has broadcast widely on radio, including BBC Radio’s Kaleidoscope, London Nights, Sunday Feature, Night Waves, The Verb and BBC World Service, as well as on BBC TV.
Claire Crowther is a British poet and author of five full-length poetry collections, Stretch of Closures, The Clockwork Gift, On Narrowness, Solar Cruise and A Pair of Three and six pamphlets, Knithoard, Bare George, Silents, Incense, Mollicle, and Glass Harmonica. Crowther is Deputy and Reviews Editor of Long Poem Magazine.
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