Review by Gary Day of "Our Weird Regiment" by Martyn Crucefix

There’s something about Martyn Crucefix’s poetry that reminds me of a theremin, an early electronic musical instrument that was played without being touched. Two antenna detected hand movements and translated them into eerie, vocal sounds. So these poems, without quite touching the substantial world, nevertheless register it in all its oddly ephemeral density. "Our Weird Regiment," the title work of the collection, recounts a visit to a stately home. It is an exquisite poem, mixing up past and present in images of quiet but devastating power. Who are "the weird regiment"? Tourists, the dead, the conformist crowd and more, all forming a splendid enigma. 

"Heal Thyself," a reference to Christ’s remark in Luke 4:23, serves as a preface to the three sections which make up the collection: "Ida Belle," "Flint" and "Homespun." The poem articulates themes of, among others, direction, displacement, timing, loss, self-disintegration and self-renewal. The imagery is a mixture of the surreal, the matter of fact, the biblical and more. Metaphysical poets were known for their startling conceits and Crucefix is part of that tradition. In an ICU "the emptying beds / cleared swiftly as a busy table service" ("Olly and Pepper Are Safe"). He is also a brilliant imagist. In the same poem we have "the dazzling fireflies of raised phones" and in "He Made This" "naked willows / will be upholstered in inches of snow." 

No contemporary poet makes more use of allusions than Crucefix. St Augustine, Bede, Easter Island statues, Breughel, Brecht, Henry de Montherlant are just a few examples. They are integral, not decorative, stitching together past and present, amplifying the value of both. Crucefix is a highly intelligent poet acutely attuned to the multiple disintegrations of our time. He offers little in the way of consolation but these poems, these oscillations, are one reason not to despair. 

About the reviewer

Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and author of several books including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama: Tragedy Comedy and Sacrifice. He is also co-editor of The Wiley Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789. His poetry has been highly commended in a number of competitions, most recently in the Write Out Loud Echoes competition. His poem "Spooky Action at a Distance" won last year's International Brilliant Poetry Competition. His work has appeared in The High Window, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawn Treader as well as various other magazines. 

Review by Lisa Natasha Wetton of "Veer, Oscillate, Rest" by Carrie Etter

Carrie Etter has a way of simplifying complex and serious narratives into easily digestible, almost kindly delivered rants in this collection. Her journey into the sentence, which starts "If one can take a sentence for a walk," is where I really begin to smile - about twenty pages in, just after the main title poem. I found myself reading each poem twice or more. The expression of her words openly mirrors the endless flow of life, where there is no end and no beginning to all that is and how we move through it.

This is political poetry, yet not polemic. At the start, she delivers a cool, collected punch to the systems that govern us and observes how we respond. From stereotypical "trailer trash," she traces the literal patterns and content of life in America. With references to presidents, corporations and culture, "My America" touches on the gamut of everything American, poetically listing in a way that is at once complete and seemingly disappointed with the lot.

"Project Cannikin" goes a step further with its damning, cut-to-the-chase lines, such as "Up goes the island - twenty-five feet! Down come a thousand dead sea otters," and "(crushed skulls) (ruptured lungs) (snapped spines) / Nine-year-old Emily said, 'It was kind of like a train ride.'" This references the impacts of nuclear testing in Alaska in 1971. The casual but cuttingly direct descriptions make no bones about the disdain for such activity, simply shining a light on the same flippant casualness with which they are perceived by the desensitised child, Emily.

"Fat" and "Tornado" both have an air of critiquing the normalised, expected modes of behaviour and happenings in a damaging culture which is the result of its own addictions and consequences. By the fifth poem, "Night England by Train," the focus moves to the UK and its bleakness. The author manages to touch very briefly on significant points that sum up a place in a flash. The colour orange and a tail mentioned paint a picture of fox hunting and countryside, at least to me. The commentary triggers our own perceptions and expresses a sort of composed anger, calmly and matter-of-factly, analysing the troubles of the world in a pinpointed way. In "The Reckoning," for example, the demise of the NHS, racism, fear, lack, survival, conflict, accountability and prejudice are all addressed succinctly - almost list-like, again complete and thorough in its critique of the absolute mess that politicians are creating.

This collection made me wonder and made me laugh. Very human, social observations touch upon all the influences hitting our world, wherever we are on the planet - buzzwords normalised, behaviours that are not. There are nods to other poets, like "The Rival" after Sylvia Plath's poem of the same name, suggesting impressions of youth and possibly mild envy, and "One for London" for W.S. Graham, referring to wine and jazz and drunken moments in "milk-grey London."

Etter aptly denotes the need for expression regarding how much of the weight of the world we have to hold, in the line: "Language, I'm going to need you shortly, if I'm going to sustain the moment's teeming." This acutely describes how much we sustain without question. Narcissism, bipolar disorder, sibling rivalry, complexities and family in an overheard conversation: "Overheard in Chicago" depicts the tone of a generation of diversity and the mental health consequences of living through certain times.

These are my perceptions of what at first seems simple and then reveals a world in quiet nutshells - or eggshells, which would be more fitting for the fragility and strength that hold us all together. There is a lot in these pages. And the title Veer, Oscillate, Rest aptly relates to the way in which the author navigates the content. Reading the pamphlet left me feeling content with the chaos and transitory nature of everything in the world and how we all meander through it. This is essential contemporary poetry. Read it slowly. Read it twice.

About the reviewer
Lisa Natasha Wetton (aka Lisa Life) is a regular contributor to the English pages of L’eco de Sitges, Barcelona. She is a Creative Artist, Coach & Hypnotherapist. She is collaborating on new writing projects with American Author Will Bashor, with whom she will be refining a draft of her first completed book, It’s all Made up – A Guide to Spirituality from a Working-Class Girl. With a twenty-year history working in Dance & Theatre and based in Barcelona for the past six years, she is happy to be delving into the world of words. See: www.newlisalife.net and www.equilibrium-events.com.

Review by Sally Evans of "The Last Days of Petrol" by Bridget Khursheed

This first poetry book by Bridget Khursheed, who lives in the Borders near Melrose, is full of powerful, distinctive poems, mostly about countryside phenomena, with a sense of continuity through ecological awareness and awareness of the present. Its seventy-eight pages, packed with poems, display a certainty of vocabulary, rhythm and phrase unusual in a first book of poems. There’s the same certainty about line ends in the poems, which vary from page width to a few having very short lines.

Some of these poems are essentially ‘nature’ poems, some imply family and children, a few are quietly polemic, like the poem about Helen Duncan, a well-researched and unusual take on the Scottish woman who became involved in Churchill’s war propaganda, or the title poem, about frantic car messages round the country, descending to

           empty journeys,
           fast except by speed cameras,

           and the trip to the shops
           things nobody needs packed
           by a teenager …

Whether these poems are set in her local Borders with their unknown lanes and riversides, Edinburgh’s Easter Road, Kelvingrove, the Eildons, or Darnick, Khursheed’s strong sense of place gives a background to the range of poems, in which there is always a link between the clearly pictured observations and the observer. In City wood above the bypass,

           I am walking through the machine-gun wood,
           looking for siskins.

and then we are told what she finds:

          the path is needled

          and high above the pitched notes of crossbill

          and goldcrest

          are the blown wires that tear up the sky

to the surprise conclusion:

         I am looking for siskins in the pinewood
         and instead I find only me.

All he vocabulary is precise and consistent. There are a few country words: cleavers, scroggs (perhaps the most obscure, meaning crabapples), technical words when wanted, freshly used words: 'Toys abraded  / into nightmare in the silence,' or 'Rucksacked, the baby cries for home.'  

With so many people publishing poems these days, and it’s a good feature of Scottish culture that poetry can thrive in this way, not too much is generally expected of a first book. But this one raises the game. It raises the hopes and discoveries of the poetry reader and shows us a live, properly managed, healthy, modern, country Scottish English. Not a line wrong, not a word out of place.

About the reviewer
Sally Evans edited Poetry Scotland from 1997-2018, and was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in 2022. 

You can read a review of Sally Evans's novel, Wildgoose: A Tale of Two Poets, on Everybody's Reviewing here.