martyncrucefix

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Katrina Porteous' most recent Bloodaxe collection, 'Rhizodont', reviewed.

An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it. The collection, Rhizodont, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2024. The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal…

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Can AI Write an Original 'Poem' By 'Me'?

The Atlantic recently posted a link to a site which can be used by authors of any stripe to check to see what, if any, of their works have (already) been used by Meta to train AI. For the last few weeks, social media have been full of understandably irate authors who discover this is exactly what has (already) happened. It looks to me as if prose works (fiction and non-fiction) as well as…

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'I am not I': the Slippery First-Person in Poems

A couple of recent experiences with my own poems being posted/published on-line and kind readers then commenting on them has made me think again about the use of the first-person singular in poems – the use of ‘I’. Perhaps ‘think again’ is the wrong phrase as I have never – or at least not since my far distant teen years – really thought of the ‘I’ appearing in my poems as identical to the…

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Three Poems by Jürgen Becker

Following on from the publication in January 2025 of my translation of ‘Dressel’s Garden’, one of Jürgen Becker’s longer poems (which recently appeared on the USA site Asymptote Journal), three more poems by this fascinating German poet have just appeared in Shearsman magazine and our hope is (permissions permitting etc) that Shearsman Books will be publishing a full collection of his work in the…

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ASMR seems linked to a particular quality of attention-giving which yields a rippling of pleasure, close to the erotic, but not the same as that. It is powerful yet undramatic; it is most common in quiet moments of observation.

[martyncrucefix]

Two New Poems - at 'The High Window'

Two new poems by yours truly – one featuring class, eroticism, and valeting a car and the other of 4 quatrains of mourning modelled on a little-know poem by Bertolt Brecht – have just been published/posted on The High Window website here. Do click the link and read the poems there – the site (edited by poet David Cooke) publishes a number of poems by different authors, so to see mine scroll down…

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Durs Grünbein Reading at The Goethe-Institute, London

Please Note: this blog and website are now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive held at The British Museum. Many thanks to them. The highlight of last week was attending Durs Grünbein’s reading at The Goethe- Institute, where he was in discussion with his English translator, Karen Leeder. At the beginning of the evening, Grünbein joked that he’d not been in the UK for a few years and…

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Remembering Geoffrey Grigson

I’ve recently seen announced a celebration of the work of Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985), scheduled to take place at 7.30pm, on Tuesday March 4th at West Greenwich Library. The event is called ‘In His Own Voice: Geoffrey’s Grigson’s Poetry’ and is being organised by John Greening with contributions from Grigson’s daughter, Caroline, his grandson, Joe Banks, and poets Graham High and Blake Morrison…

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Remembering Blue Nose Poetry events in London

I recently attended the launch of Philip Gross’ new collection, The Shores of Vaikus (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) at the Estonian Embassy (the poems and prose pieces in the book refer to Gross’ father’s Estonian heritage and the poet’s visits to that country). I’ve followed his poetry since Faber published The Ice Factory in 1984. Neither of us could recall when we’d last met up but, after the event, I…

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'Dressel's Garden' - a new translation from the German

The first ever translation into English of Jürgen Becker's 1993 poem 'Dressel's Garden'

My new translation of a long(ish) Jürgen Becker poem (the first ever into English) has just been posted on the US site, Asymptote. Do click the link above and have a look at it. You can also hear an audio recording of the opening passages of the poem read in German (thank you, old friend, Tim Turner). Becker’s work is really very unusual – and hardly known at all in translation. I have been…

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RIP Michael Longley

Social media – at least the bit of it that arrives on my screens – is alive this morning with many expressions of sadness at the announcement of the death of Michael Longley. I heard him read just a few months ago to launch his most recent new selected poems, Ash Keys, at the LRB Bookshop in London. He insisted then on trying to stand to read his poems, though his breathlessness and physical…

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A Bedroom Paranoia: a new poem

Martyn Crucefix: A bedroom paranoia

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Impressions of the TS Eliot Prize Readings 2025

I’ve always enjoyed Ladybird spotting the ways poets present themselves in a reading situation. Last night’s TS Eliot prize readings at the Festival Hall was a grand opportunity for such a pursuit. Ten readers in a row. Here are a few jotted down impressions, gleaned from the on-line version of the show. Before you crucify me for such poor, ill-informed critical judgements, I do hereby declare I…

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‘Midsummer at High Laver’: a return to an old poem of mine

We were out in Essex recently. My daughter is planning to get married and she wanted to look at wedding venues! I know. Things you do. I’ll give nothing away but just to say the trip was a success – the happy day will be in 18 months time. But while checking google maps as to how to get to the venue, I noticed that we were going to be driving near the village of High Laver. All sorts of bells…

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'Muzzle' - a new poem for the New Year

Happy New Year to all. here's anew poem for the New Year

Happy New Year to all of you. We are hoping for the best aren’t we? Come rain, shine or named storm, the poems go on, saying something at least for the individual, the social, for careful consideration of the world out there, the world in here, and the languages we use. I’m posting a poem which has just appeared on New Year’s Day at the excellent Modron Magazine, its strap line is ‘Writing on…

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George Szirtes' King's Gold Medal for Poetry

The announcement of the award of the King's Gold Medal for Poetry to George Szirtes gives me the chance to re-post this detailed review I wrote for Poetry London about two books published to celebrate Szirtes' 60th birthday.

This week’s announcement of the award of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry to George Szirtes gives me the opportunity to re-post a long and detailed review I wrote (for Poetry London) of the two books that Bloodaxe Books published to celebrate Szirtes’ 60th birthday. These were the New and Collected Poems and a critical book about his work, Reading George Szirtes, written by John Sears. Though…

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Translating Georg Heym’s ‘Berlin II’

an early Expressionist writer (of poems and short prose/novellas), his best-known poems combine a gothic, morbid imagination, often with extremes of Expressionistic distortion, with a counterbalancing devotion to regular forms.

Michael Hofmann’s Faber Book of Twentieth Century German Poems includes four pieces by Georg Heym – not bad for someone who died at the age of 24 (in 1912 – an accidental drowning in the frozen Havel River, probably while trying to save a friend). Heym is generally regarded as an early Expressionist writer (of poems and short prose/novellas), though his early poems are very much under the…