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

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

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

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