This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Roads Across Europe’ by Martyn Crucefix, author of The Lovely Disciplines.
Displaying his characteristic flair, craft and intelligence, Crucefix’s poems often begin with the visible, the tangible, the ordinary, yet through each act of attentiveness and the delicate fluidity of the language they re-discover the extraordinary in the everyday.
‘…highly wrought, ambitious, thoughtful – and very good.’ – The Sunday Times
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A prolific, popular and prize-winning author of fantasy fiction, Catherine began her career as a poet, and returned to poetry earlier this year with her collection 
well-regarded author who has published his work in national magazines like The Spectator, London Magazine and the PN Review. It has a distinctive flavour. The author is a realist and a formalist, preferring simple, accurate language and use of formal meter. This makes for unusually clear and accessible work. A powerful underlying current of emotion also drives these poems and is contained and restrained by the more austere formal qualities.
vivid and moving. It opens with poems inspired by her home in the Lake District, and the landscape and famous Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats, who have walked there and written about the fells and lakes. Nature is a guiding presence, but the author’s personal story, of enduring a little-known and sometimes debilitating illness, is also the backdrop to this striking poetry. Formally, this work is more akin to the metaphysical poets in its fervent use of metaphor, in its multiple layers of meaning and in its quest for answers to the most pressing questions of mortality.
