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 Tracey Foster of "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan

 

          Red runs through
          like a weeping wound -
          a scab twice picked.

- Tracey Foster

There's a red thread that runs deeply through Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel. From the very first, we are faced with a stubborn blood blister under the nail that preoccupies the protagonist Dorrigo Evans as a small child and diverts his attention away from a critical act that will come back to haunt him as a middle-aged man. The blister can only be resolved by a red-hot kitchen knife that makes a hole in the nail, a blade with 'globules of fat' that will take on much more sinister appearance during Dorrigo's time as POW in Burma. This is a story of one man's life and death and the connections he makes in between.

          A world of dew
          and in every dew drop
          a world of struggle.

- Issa

Flanagan is an expert at fluctuating between different time frames and takes us from youth to old age and any point in between, weaving a tale that is multi-layered and interconnected. Characters talk to us through the third-person narration as we begin to join up the dots. His paramour, Amy, is first seen wearing a red camellia in her hair and this becomes such a potent symbol that in later life Dorrigo has a camellia bush cut down after he moves to a new house with his family.

          A bee
          staggers out
          of the peony.

- Basho

Flanagan has a personal connection to the torturous conditions the POWs suffered during the building of the Burma railway. His own father was a POW at this time and died on the day that he finished writing the novel. These gruesome, gut-wrenching tales can only come from one who has heard of this first hand. We can only hope that these stories bear witness to a dark period of humanity that we shall never see the likes of again.

          Only the monkeys 
          can laugh - in the heat
          of the jungle.

- Tracey Foster

The title of the novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, takes its cue from the Japanese poet Basho's book of the same name. This poet's journeys and poems became the first form of haibun writing, prose interspersed with haiku. Flanagan drops haiku into the text to break up the chapters and add another layer of emotion to the story. After savagely beating a POW to near death, a guard tells Dorrigo,

          A world of pain
          if the cherry blossoms,
          it blossoms.

- Basho

Guards who dispense relentless barbaric punishments on the POW are shown swapping haiku favourites in their quiet moments displaying a discordant relationship between humanity and nature. The haikus act as rest breaks to the violence, diverting and regrouping our emotions before the next chapter. Later on, another guard is asked to reflect on his life in old age and write a traditional death poem, left behind for his loved ones. As we hope and await absolution he recites

          Winter ice
          melts into clear water.
          Clear is my heart.

This novel is a harrowing tale of love, loss, torture, pain and release. As readers, we long for resolution, a glimpse of a happy ending but as Flanagan emphasises, life is just simply not like that. We take what we can and make the best of things. Maybe that is our strength, to endure and leave behind a tale to tell. This is one tale that Flanagan was born to tell. 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.