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last update:

16th May 12

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poetry favourites:
Enitharmon Press

 

and in the shop…
collections –
“Between a Drowning Man”,
Salt;
“Cargo of Limbs” (chapbook),
Hercules Editions;
“The Lovely Disciplines”,
Seren Books;
“O. at the Edge of the Gorge”
(illustrated limited edition chapbook),
Guillemot Press;
“Daodejing”,
(translation),
“Sonnets to Orpheus”
(translation),
“Hurt”,
“Duino Elegies”
(translation),

 

 

this poet is taking part in the poetry tREnD project

 

Martyn works as poet, teacher, reviewer, critic, translator and competition judge. He is a tutor with the Poetry School in London. He was a founder member of the group ShadoWork, specializing in performing and writing collaboratively.
 
Martyn’s first collection, Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990), was published by Enitharmon Press and his Arvon prize-winning poem, At The Mountjoy Hotel, appeared with Enitharmon in Spring 1993. A second collection, On Whistler Mountain, was published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1994 and his third book, A Madder Ghost (Enitharmon, 1997), 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”.
 
An English Nazareth (2004) and his translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (2006) were published by Enitharmon with the latter being shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as “unlikely to be bettered for very many years” (Magma). His most recent collection, Hurt, appeared in 2010. His new translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus is due Autumn 2012.
 
Martyn’s poems have appeared in magazines and journals including: Acumen, Ambit, Critical Quarterly, The Independent, The London Magazine, The London Review of Books, Magma, New Welsh Review, Oxford Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Cortland Review (USA), The Rialto, Stand, Tabla, Thumbscrew and The Times Literary Supplement.
 
He was featured in 1988 in a special edition of Poetry Review, ‘New British Poets’. His poems have been anthologised in Voices in the Gallery, edited by Dannie and Joan Abse (Tate Gallery Publications, 1986) and Touchstones (Hodder & Stoughton, 1987), Contemporary Christian Poetry (Collins, 1990), Beneath the Wide, Wide Heaven (Virago, 1991), Field Days (Common Ground, 1998), The River’s Voice (Common Ground, 2000) and Radio Waves (Enitharmon, 2004).
 
Martyn won a major Eric Gregory award in 1984 and a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1991. He was placed second in the 1991 Arvon/Observer International Poetry Competition. He won joint first prize in the Sheffield Thursday Poetry Competition, 1993, with his poem On Whistler Mountain. He has won prizes and commendations in the National Poetry Competition, the Kent, Cardiff, Lancaster, Northampton and Leek festival competitions, as well as the Hippocrates and Keats-Shelley Poetry Competitions.
 
Critical Opinions:
 

Crucefix has, as always, an exceptional ear … superbly intelligent … urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful.

 

Kathryn Maris, Poetry London.

 
 

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.

 

Vona Groarke, P N Review.

 
 

highly wrought, ambitious, thoughtful – and very good.

 

Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times.

 
 

Crucefix aspires to be the patron saint who can lift us into the clouds … and in the best of these poems we rise with him and are then returned to earth by his many routes, squarely, impressively, on both feet.

 

Acumen.

 
 

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.

 

Tim Liardet, Poetry Wales.

 
 

On Martyn’s Rilke translation:

 
 

a translation of the Elegies which makes all previous ones clumsy and partial. With the German text in parallel and a useful commentary on each elegy, it deserves to become the standard English edition worldwide.

 

Hannah Salt, Magma.

 
 

substantial, powerful and necessary work. Readers may well fall in love with parts of it and regard the Crucefix Rilke as their life partner.

 

George Szirtes, Poetry London.

 
 

masterful transformations of difficult German syntax into a natural and contemporary English … highly readable.

 

Helen Bridge, Translation and Literature.

 

Collections not in ‘shop entry’ (enquiries to Martyn Crucefix) –
 
Enitharmon Press:
   An English Nazareth, 2004, £7.95, ISBN 1-900564-14-9
   A Madder Ghost, 1997, £7.95, ISBN 1 900564 10 6
   At The Mountjoy Hotel, 1993, £3.50, ISBN 978-1-8706129-8-2
   Beneath Tremendous Rain, 1990, (signed) £10, ISBN 978-1-8706122-6-5
 

Sinclair-Stevenson:
   On Whistler Mountain, 1994