Review by Debasish Lahiri of "Walking Away" by Martyn Crucefix

Only participles here: their ghosts fill the passing of present and present pasts in Martyn Crucefix’s latest pamphlet Walking Away. One does not need to stand in the mere of biblical lore to realize that the "end" is a process. To be witness to our parents – their touch growing cold upon the warmth of our grasp, often desperate grasp, and their memories slipping like wind through the parapet of our fingers, or sand – is to be in the arc, or archetype, of the end. Crucefix’s poetry talks as much of us who are left behind as of our parents who grow more distant, more alien, without being able to go anywhere. 

           You hear cars hiss along the road
           Cars hissing along the road

           Only present participles

In writing about his parents, and their misted lens of time, where everything is either disconcertingly different, or befuddlingly the same, Crucefix unravels the tyranny of that continuum called the Present. With the deftest of touches he paints a time, the only time where we can be partakers together, but also a cruel time with no recall or hope for a future recognition. 

           Mother of your brother and sister
           Mother of your three sons

           The same car speeding away

Reading this collection one can’t but feel that it all stands up or falls apart depending on the miraculous presence or absence of that hand or arm in the precipitate moment when the mind is afraid, limbs waver on the verge of a fumble and a silent swipe at balance comes up with aether. It isn’t merely furniture that has moved. Care-givers move through the house. A flux of children, wives and kin sweep through. The house turns out to be a Care-Home.

           Dining chair and coffee table 
           Shifted here and there

           Losing you. Your balance too

Walking Away has three shorter poems - "Video Call," "My Mother’s Care Home Room (as Cleopatra’s monument)" and "In This Quiet One-way West Country Town" – along with the eponymous long sequence of tercets, measuring the calculus of change in human life. Crucefix adapts the Japanese form of the Haiku brilliantly in his long sequence "Walking Away." This is a sense adaptation of the form, not necessarily a servile conformity to the 5-7-5 syllabic fiat, but a reinterpretation of the dynamic, emphasizing the break (after two lines or one), and corresponding to the idea of the Kireji or the divide in Japanese. Strictly speaking these are more akin to Senryu, poetry that speaks of human life rather than the natural world. 

Crucefix reminds us that living is a one-way road (not just in West Country towns). There’s no way back. Living is a walking away from the consolations of Time, an inexorable moving away of people dearest to us, our parents. His poetry stands up, unflinchingly, to this bruise.

About the reviewer  
Debasish Lahiri has nine collections of poetry to his credit, the latest being A Certain Penance of Light (2025). Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019.

Review by Lee Wright of "Common" by Nikolai Duffy

With Common, his first novel, Nikolai Duffy explores transcendentalism in a search for the sacred within the everyday. The narrator, Robert, returns to his childhood home in Hampshire to settle the affairs of his late aunt's estate. But it soon becomes clear that Robert is seeking something far deeper, a spiritual awakening beyond the duties of an executor. A walk across the local common leads him to construct a simple hut, and he retreats into it for a week of introspection. 

Sometimes the only way for a writer to tackle the big questions is by starting with the small ones, and all portraits are, to a large degree, self-portraits. Robert admits to being happy to be among the folds and shadows of the heathland, and it is impossible not to see Duffy himself, enclosed within the books, drafts, and notes of the writing room; both the author and his narrator are surrounded by the things that nurture creativity.

Robert’s thoughts sail over many mundane seas - patches of sunlight filter through unwashed windows as he defrosts bread for his breakfast, he drinks coffee, he texts GIFs to his wife, Claire, and his two children. But a novel can show you what a character is thinking, and then show you what they are saying, and Duffy achieves that distance between the two. The author elevates otherwise simple acts into symbolic enactments; themes of fate, guilt, responsibility, and transformation are repeated throughout. 

Having resolved to construct his makeshift hut, Robert describes heading out to the common "under the weight of what I was carrying. The posts were cumbersome, and I struggled to hold them." 

The echo is clear: this is Robert’s Way of the Cross. If we dismiss the Simon of Cyrene narrative, then Robert, like Jesus of Nazareth, carries his cross himself. For Robert, this is a test, a moment of spiritual reckoning. He will not be the man he was when he left. With the common alive with croaks and scurries after dark, Robert experiences a fierce exhilaration in forging his own Walden-like retreat. Yet the issue of claiming ownership cannot be overlooked. Robert believed that his devoted aunt considered him a work in progress, a project to nurture and cultivate, and in building his hut on the common, he is equally complicit in treating a space as something to shape for himself.

Duffy’s expertise in literature and creative writing is evident in the intellectual richness of Common, yet the novel’s pacing is occasionally hindered by the persistent influence of his academic background. But if Socrates was right that the unexamined life is not worth living, then Duffy demonstrates a remarkable capacity to see the world anew and to deepen our understanding of it. 

About the reviewer
Lee Wright is a fiction and non-fiction writer currently undertaking a research degree at the University of Leicester, where his thesis focuses life-writing informed by horror cinema.  

Review by Rhiannon Buckley of "Angel Reach" by Gus Gresham

Characters feel unflinchingly imperfect and real in this collection of short stories by Gus Gresham. For me, the author writes in a way which is unapologetic to the human experience and calls on you to see through another’s eyes. When the character stumbles upon a question, often seemingly unanswerable, I found myself asking the same thing.

Not all books are easy for me to visualise but the stories Angel Reach flowed beautifully and played out like a movie in my mind. None more so than "Woofers and Tweeters" - I love the way the characters here intertwine, adding layers as you read. I really do look forward to reading more short stories from Gus Gresham. Excellent stuff!

About the reviewer
Rhiannon Buckley is an East Midlands based author, actor and communication skills educator. Her first book A Mind Blown was published in 2025. 

You can read more about Angel Reach by Gus Gresham on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Karen Powell-Curtis of "Poems of a Nottingham Lace-Runner" by Mary Bailey

Mary Bailey published her pamphlet of thirteen poems in 1826 to raise money to support her nine children. Her poems offer an insight into the world of working-class women in the 1820s and, in particular, Mary Bailey’s life. John Goodridge’s introduction to this revised edition offers context to the poems in terms of time, place and social class.

Lace-runners were employed to embroider patterns onto lace, and in "Petition to the British Fair" Bailey writes: "How hard have we work’d, and our eyes how we’ve strain’d, / When those beautiful flowers we run." Later in the poem, we discover this work isn’t rewarded as well as it should be: 

          How pleasant’s the task, whenever we’re ask’d,
                 To work hard to beautify you;
          Then I’m sure you will own, with candour, unmask’d,
                 Good food and good clothing’s our due; 

          But the price is so low, that, sad to relate, 
                 We cannot these blessings obtain.

Bailey never views her nine children as a burden in spite of her poverty. "To a Lady who desired me to pray for the death of my youngest child" is her response to the woman who made this heartless suggestion. Her love for her children is clear in the lines "Her innocent smile shall my troubles beguile, / And make poverty light as a feather." In the final stanza she comments "lady, forbear to advise, / Till a mother’s affections you feel." In "The Author to Her Infant Twins," she expresses similar sentiments: "Welcome, dear little strangers, welcome here, / Altho’ to keen adversity you’ve come."

"The Locust" is addressed to her daughters and carries the message they should never be cruel. This poem gives us a strong sense of Bailey’s character. She is horrified to discover two young girls playing with "a poor little locust, pierc’d through with a pin." She tells them:

           To a nice school you go, where a lady doth teach,
                  And you much finer feelings should learn;
          But, I’m better than you, though my frock’s common blue,
                  While my heart doth such cruelty spurn. 

Bailey may have published her poems to meet an immediate financial need but two hundred years later they are still relevant.

About the reviewer
Karen Powell-Curtis has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies and magazines.