Our Weird Regiment

Martyn Crucefix is a British poet and translator, the author of eight original collections of poetry, including Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023) and Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019). A chapbook, Walking Away, is published by Dare-Gale Press. Crucefix has received an Eric Gregory award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translations (from the German) of poems by Peter Huchel, published by Shearsman Books. His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation. His translations of essays by German poet and novelist, Lutz Seiler, In Case of Loss, are published by And Other Stories, and a major Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, is published by Pushkin Press (2024). His new translation of Jurgen Becker's 1993 collection, Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium is published by Shearsman Books in 2026. Till recently, Crucefix was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library and he edits the Acumen Poetry Magazine Young Poets web page.

'Crucefix has, as always, an exceptional ear . . . superbly intelligent . . . urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful' - Kathryn MarisOn Walking Away:'Learning, no doubt, from the poetry he has translated . . . Crucefix has become more and more experimental, more complicatedly troubled . . . He knows how to find the imagistic essence of a situation and his gift for metaphor has always been considerable . . . Walking Away demands to be read' -John Greening'[These are] despatches from a fond but fearful place - so close to the depths of loved-ones' old age ... Sharply observant of himself as well as what's around him, Crucefix is an acute but tactful guide to somewhere most of us, at any age, are loath to go' -Philip GrossOn Between a Drowning Man:Crucefix's skill at managing sequences is stunning. In language that arrests, disturbs, and provokes reflection, each poem refracts and reflects the whole. By examining contemporary life in all its flawed difficulty... these poems call on us to witness how our vulnerability isolates and unites us' -Heidi Williamson