Martyn Crucefix

{{BLP unreferenced section|date=September 2023}}

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{{cite web |url=http://www.societyofauthors.org/eric-gregory-past-winners |title=Eric Gregory Past Winners | Society of Authors – Protecting the rights and furthering the interests of authors |publisher=Society of Authors |date= |access-date=23 November 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160908050942/http://www.societyofauthors.org/eric-gregory-past-winners |archive-date=8 September 2016 |url-status=dead }} and a Hawthornden Fellowship.{{cite web|url=https://www.rlf.org.uk/writer/martyn-crucefix/|title=Martyn Crucefix|website=rlf.org.uk|publisher=Royal Literary Fund|access-date=27 February 2025}} Among his several original collections are: Beneath Tremendous Rain (Enitharmon, 1990);{{cite web|url=http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/product/beneath-tremendous-rain/|title=Beneath Tremendous Rain - Enitharmon Press|last=|first=|date=|website=|publisher=Enitharmon.co.uk|access-date=17 March 2017}} At the Mountjoy Hotel (Enitharmon, 1993);{{cite web|url=http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/product/mountjoy-hotel/|title=At the Mountjoy Hotel – Enitharmon Press|last=|first=|date=|website=|publisher=Enitharmon.co.uk|access-date=17 March 2017}} On Whistler Mountain (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994); A Madder Ghost (Enitharmon, 1997);{{Cite news|url=http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/product/a-madder-ghost-martyn-crucefix/|title=A Madder Ghost|date=2016-11-29|work=Enitharmon Editions|access-date=2017-03-17|language=en-US}} An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004);{{cite web|url=http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/product/an-english-nazareth/|title=An English Nazareth - Enitharmon Press|last=|first=|date=|website=|publisher=Enitharmon.co.uk|access-date=17 March 2017}} Hurt (Enitharmon, 2010).{{cite web|url=http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/product/hurt/|title=Hurt - Enitharmon Press|last=|first=|date=|website=|publisher=Enitharmon.co.uk|access-date=17 March 2017}} His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006){{cite web|url=http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/product/duino-elegies-rainer-maria-rilke-martyn-crucefix/|title=Duino Elegies - Enitharmon Press|last=|first=|date=|website=|publisher=Enitharmon.co.uk|access-date=17 March 2017}} was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as "unlikely to be bettered for very many years" (Magma){{cite web|url=http://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-37-2/articles/exterminating-angels-and-the-singing-god/ |title=Exterminating Angels and the Singing God – Magma Poetry |publisher=Magmapoetry.com |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}} and by the Popescu judges as "a milestone of translation and a landmark in European poetry".{{cite web |url=http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/publications/poetrynews/pn07/popescu07/ |title=(Corneliu M Popescu Prize 2007) |publisher=The Poetry Society |date=4 March 1977 |access-date=23 November 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071024140918/http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/publications/poetrynews/pn07/popescu07/ |archive-date=24 October 2007 |url-status=dead }}

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.The Gregory Poems: The Best of the Young British Poets 1983–84 (eds. John Fuller Howard Sergeant, Salamander Press, 1985). 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".Herbert Lomas, Ambit. 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".Anne Stevenson, Stand.

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. 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"John Greening, Poetry Review. 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".Tim Liardet, Poetry Wales. Alan Brownjohn, writing in The Sunday Times characterised it as a "substantial and rewarding collection . . . highly wrought, ambitious, thoughtful".The Sunday Times, 8 May 1994.

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".Vrona Groarke, P N Review 119 (1998). 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".Anne Stevenson, blurb for A Madder Ghost. Kathryn Maris also praised it as "urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful"Kathryn Maris, Poetry London. and Gillian Allnutt thought the poems timely in their engagement with "proactive fatherhood" in ways that were "tender, humorous and . . . profound".Gillian Allnutt, Poetry Review.

• Between a Drowning Man (2023, Salt Publishing)
• Cargo of Limbs (2019, Hercules Editions)
• The Lovely Disciplines (2017, Seren Books)
• O. at the Edge of the Gorge (2017, Guillemot Press)
• A Convoy (2017, If a Leaf Falls Press)
• A Hatfield Mass (2014, Worple Press)
• The Time We Turned (2014, Shearsman Books)
• Hurt (2010, Enitharmon Press)
• An English Nazareth (2004, Enitharmon Press)
• A Madder Ghost (1997, Enitharmon Press)
• On Whistler Mountain (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994)
• At The Mountjoy Hotel (1993, Enitharmon Press)
• Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990, Enitharmon Press)

• These Numbered Days, poems by Peter Huchel (Shearsman Books, 2019): translation
• Daodejing – a new version in English (2016, Enitharmon Press): translation
• Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (2012, Enitharmon Press): translation
• Rilke's Duino Elegies (2006, Enitharmon Press): translation

• Audio Recording made at The South Bank Centre in 2012.{{YouTube|JbkMyBse5MI}}
• Two poems from "Essays in Island Logic" (from Hurt){{cite web|url=http://www.shearsman.com/pages/magazine/pdfs/83_84online.pdf |title=Shearsman Editions 83 & 84; Summer 2010 |editor=Tony Frazer |publisher=Shearsman.com |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• Three poems from "Essays in Island Logic" (from Hurt) with accompanying essay{{cite web|url=http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page16.htm |title=The Bow-Wow Shop 10 – Page 5 Sebastian Barker |publisher=Bowwowshop.org.uk |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• "He considers what the young have to teach" (from Hurt){{cite web|author=Verse Daily |url=http://www.versedaily.org/2011/aboutmartyncrucefixh.shtml |title=About Hurt by Martyn Crucefix |publisher=Verse Daily |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• "Water-lily" (from Hurt){{cite web |url=http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/magazines/60/poem/water-lily |title=Martyn Crucefix Water-lily |publisher=Poetrylondon.co.uk |access-date=23 November 2012 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130602215102/http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/magazines/60/poem/water-lily |archivedate=2 June 2013 |df=dmy-all }}
• "While There is War" (with audio) (from Hurt){{cite web|url=http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/08/spring/crucefix.html |title=Martyn Crucefix – Spring 2008 Feature |publisher=The Cortland Review |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• "Growth of a poet's mind" (from Hurt){{cite web |url=http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page13.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120710233215/http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page13.htm |url-status=dead |archive-date=10 July 2012 |title=The Bow-Wow Shop 3 – Page 12 Martyn Crucefix |date=29 December 2009 |access-date=23 November 2012 |df=dmy-all }}
• "Invocation" (from Hurt){{cite web |url=http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/poetry/poemoftheweek/invocation/ |title=Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre |publisher=Ah.brookes.ac.uk |date=3 April 2011 |access-date=23 November 2012 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://archive.today/20120712110357/http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/poetry/poemoftheweek/invocation/ |archivedate=12 July 2012 |df=dmy-all }}
• "Ivy tunnel at Kenwood" (uncollected){{cite web|url=http://londongrip.co.uk/2011/12/london-grip-new-poetry-winter-2011/#crucefix |title=London Grip New Poetry – Winter 2011 |publisher=Londongrip.co.uk |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• "Road" (uncollected){{cite web|last=Swift |first=Todd |url=http://toddswift.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/featured-poet-martin-crucefix.html |title=Eyewear: Featured Poet: Martyn Crucefix |publisher=Toddswift.blogspot.co.uk |date=11 March 2011 |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• "On foot" (uncollected){{cite web|url=http://antiphon.org.uk/index.php/act-one/20-act-one-poem-two |title=On foot – Martyn Crucefix |publisher=Antiphon.org.uk |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• "La Bastide-de-Bousignac" and "Morning Song" (uncollected){{cite web|url=http://lochravenreview.net/2011Spring/crucefix.html |title=Martyn Crucefix |publisher=Loch Raven Review |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• "Tortoise" (from An English Nazareth){{cite web|url=http://www.docstoc.com/docs/70237127/MARTYN-CRUCEFIX-Tortoise-Drop-jawed-and-pink-tongued-with-what- |title=MARTYN CRUCEFIX Tortoise Drop-jawed and pink-tongued with what |publisher=Docstoc.com |date=28 January 2011 |access-date=23 November 2012}}

• On recent contemporary poetry about the war in Iraq.{{cite web |url=http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/magazines/70/article/mulberry-and-oleander |title=Martyn Crucefix Mulberry and Oleander |publisher=Poetrylondon.co.uk |access-date=23 November 2012 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130603095341/http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/magazines/70/article/mulberry-and-oleander |archivedate=3 June 2013 |df=dmy-all }}
• Review of Sinead Morrissey's Through the Square Window{{cite web|url=http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showdoc=865;doctype=review |title=Carcanet Press – Review of Sinead Morrissey's 'Through the Square Window'-Martyn Crucefix, Poetry London Summer 2010 no. 66 |publisher=Carcanet.co.uk |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• Essay on Boris Pasternak's influence on the completion of "Essays in Island Logic" (from Hurt) with three poems
• On John Milton's On Education: BBC broadcast{{cite web|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fvnb8 |title=BBC Radio 3 – The Essay, John Milton, the Essayist, Episode 1 |publisher=Bbc.co.uk |date=8 December 2008 |access-date=23 November 2012}} and the text available at{{cite web|url=http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page58.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100528103449/http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page58.htm |url-status=dead |archive-date=28 May 2010 |title=The Bow-Wow Shop 5 – Page 28 Martyn Crucefix |date=23 May 2010 |access-date=23 November 2012 }} and on YouTube.{{YouTube|gEqgm0F3LMI}}
• “The Drunken Porter Does Poetry: Metre and Voice in the Poems of Tony Harrison,"{{cite web|url=http://www.enotes.com/tony-harrison-criticism/harrison-tony/martyn-crucefix-essay-date-1997 |title=Tony Harrison Criticism – Martyn Crucefix（essay date 1997） |publisher=Enotes.com |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}} Originally published in Tony Harrison: Loiner, edited by Sandie Byrne, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 161–70.
• Review of Michael Donaghy and Anne-Marie Fyfe{{cite web|url=http://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-34/articles/michael-donaghy-and-anne-marie-fyfe-reviewed/ |title=Michael Donaghy and Anne-Marie Fyfe reviewed – Magma Poetry |publisher=Magmapoetry.com |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}
• Review of Philip Levine and Dan Chiasson{{cite web|url=http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=24625 |title=Reviews |publisher=Poetry Magazines |date= |access-date=23 November 2012}}

{{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}

• {{Official website|http://martyncrucefix.com/|Blog and official website}}
• [http://michaelpeverett.com/selhist4b.htm#MCrucefix1994 Essay on Beneath Tremendous Rain and On Whistler Mountain] by Michael Peverett

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Category:1956 births

Category:Alumni of Lancaster University

Category:Alumni of Worcester College, Oxford

Category:British male poets

Category:British poets

Category:British translators

Category:Living people