Featured Poet: Martyn Crucefix


Eyewear is very glad to welcome British poet Martyn Crucefix(pictured) to its pages this crisp March Friday in London, the Ides of March.  Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship.  He has published four collections, including An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004). His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies was published by Enitharmon in 2006, shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as “unlikely to be bettered for very many years” (Magma). His new collection, Hurt, has just been published by Enitharmon.

Road

As noiseless bronzed miles

slip rapidly past

they stand in lay-bys

as if waiting in the wild

each dressed with care

in this Catholic country

though not discreetly

and this is not the city

passing one

then another

you realise slowly

the fifth or sixth time

your stare’s returned

by shaded full-on eyes

locked to your turning

the steady

rise and fall of the big engine

In their strappy tops

one clamped to a mobile

is talking to another

there is community here

as you wind through

gunning south

taking poorly-marked borders

no destination

You try staring them out

like a single shot

a bare possibility

while at speed another car

moving in the opposite direction

its driver

and her husband

barely registering

what with the young girl

in the back seat

asking every scrap

of their attention

how you pull across

how willingly you decline

the smoked silent glass

Comments

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E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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