Hurt
Published on 9. November 2010
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-1-904634-97-3 (ISBN)
Description
Nightjars, lilies, beetles, poems by Stalin, Whitmanesque despatches from an American war, the flight of refugees, ambiguous revolutionary cells, Homer's Ithaca, the lives of Petrarch and Keats. Such items fill the table-top. But the boy does not climb to it. He does not clamber down and away. Despite everything, the boy seems prepared to stand there counting. The tensions that animate Martyn Crucefix's fifth collection are those between openness and closure, vulnerability and defiance, liberal and fundamentalist. Bearing the impress of his acclaimed translations of Rilke's Duino Elegies, this book moves towards an openness to experience that is always threatened by the facts of suffering. Less about what hurts us, more how we respond to it, the reader is carried towards an affirming, comprehensive vision that declares this, this is mineA".
Reviews / Votes
Crucefix has, as always, an exceptional ear ... superbly intelligent ... urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful.A" Kathryn Maris, Poetry London... at his best, bringing physical truths faithfully into an intense focus whilst remaining alive to their more outlandish implications, their capacity for dream-making.A" Tim Liardet, Poetry Wales. Crucefix uses a quotidian, work-a-day language that doesn't holler and doesn't hang about. Its lack of rhetoric sits easily with the subject-matter, at once so ordinary and so remarkable.A" Vona Groarke, P N Review. highly wrought, ambitious, thoughtful - and very good." Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times.More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-904634-97-3 (9781904634973)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Martyn Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship and has published four previous collections, including An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004). His translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) was shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as unlikely to be bettered for very many yearsA".