Poetry review – OUR WEIRD REGIMENT: Shanta Acharya discusses Martyn Crucefix’s thoughtful and eloquent explorations of change and fragility
Our Weird Regiment
Martyn Crucefix
Shearsman Books
ISBN 978-1-83738-005-3
108pp £12.95
Martyn Crucefix’s eighth original collection of poetry, Our Weird Regiment, impresses with its deep awareness of many of the issues that confront us today. His poems hold us among doubts and mysteries, leaving us to meditate on the precariousness of our existence. His ability to find meaning in this precariousness penetrates ‘like a language / streaming over the dark gulf of the world // to pierce the obscure recesses of the mind.’ (“Masculinity”). Many of the poems set in ordinary, domestic life become occasions for metaphysical reflection.
A translator, reviewer, and poetry blogger, Crucefix has won prizes for both his translations and original poetry. A translator of Rilke (Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Change Your Life), Laozi (Daodejing), Huchel (These Numbered Days), Lutz Seiler (In Case of Loss), Jürgen Becker (Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium) among others, Crucefix’s own repertoire of poems has been enriched by this larger critical exposure.
“Descent from White Hill”, for example, is an English version of Li Po’s poem “Coming Down from Chung-Nan Mountain by Hu-Szu’s Hermitage”. Not something a reader would have known without the author’s note. Nor, perhaps, would the reader have read Li Po’s poem. The poem ends with: ‘and there is nothing / we know left to spoil / our brief forgetfulness / of that other world’
“On Southampton Street/ after Bertolt Brecht” is another example. It is a version of Brecht’s 1934 poem, “Der Orangenkauf”, one of his ‘English Sonnets’ probably addressed to Margarete Steffin (author’s note). Seeing his mother’s favourite flowers, chrysanthemums, Crucefix remembers ‘since last night you’re not here or any place’.
Crucefix’s versatility transforms conversations with friends into ‘Highly Commended’ poems such as “Maggots” which asks ‘the question that no-one ever / answers: what is it, what’s all this for?’ The two quotes that preface the book – ‘make music and work at it’ from Phaedo by Plato, and the extract from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, ‘… to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates’ offer insights, hints and guesses. Grafting his work onto diverse poetic traditions lend Crucefix’s writing an experimental edge.
Crucefix’s new poems (actually many of the poems in this collection were written before the publication of his seventh book, (Between A Drowning Man) evoke ‘an acute sense of decline and fall,’ along with ‘a sense of menace and insecurity in the environmental, political and personal spheres.’ The title poem, “Our Weird Regiment” ends with:
…a scattering of bones
assembles itself
in a heap at the gate
now beyond the gate
our weird regiment
lurches into the road
a swaying of skulls
and whitened knucklebones.
The poems in Between A Drowning Man also spoke of ways in which things fall apart. That image of a world in discord reaffirms itself here in no uncertain terms. The reference to Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal on the front cover of Between A Drowning Man evokes a deep sense of loss, ‘the pathos of old things passing away and no things coming’. The great past crumbling down, without being replaced by anything admirable, is palpable in the refrain: all the bridges are falling down. Broken bridges offer a metaphor for alienation, if not collision and confrontation, as a default landscape of our increasingly broken and fractured times. ‘The unearthed bones of the dispossessed gather together to march’ is how Our Weird Regiment masterfully expresses it.
The poems appear under three sections – 1. Ida Belle. 2. Flint. 3. Homespun. Sharply observant of himself and the world around him, Crucefix sets the scene with the first poem, a stand-alone one, “Heal Thyself”. By the time the Schools offered him a place to study medicine, he had
Fallen
to wandering streets
to stealing Everyman’s Selected Wordsworth
I was John Stuart Mill
hoping my soul
might be saved…
This set him free to follow his own path:
at least not imposed
not merely allowed
and if you want to live
deliberately first
you slit the shroud.
Though there are several good poets who practiced medicine, in Crucefix’s case his inability to do so has done him no harm. As a teacher of English, he had the best of both worlds. Examining contemporary life in all its flawed aspects, in language that evokes careful consideration, his poems are ‘more complicatedly troubled’ (John Greening with reference to Crucefix’s earlier work), capturing our troubled times.
‘I can talk of course’ Crucefix confesses in “Ping” (the first poem in Ida Belle) ‘but mostly listen’ even though ‘nothing can be simply what it declares’ (“How to Send a Plain Dispatch”). Yet, if you know “How to Listen In”, ‘the earth’s complex song / still buoys the city’. The simplicity and clarity of this message is uplifting. The realisation of change, of things not being as they seem, is captured tenderly in “Anniversary”, (a fine ecopoem that plays with notions of time, change, the environment) when the poet’s own happiness is
a picture stashed away still
of Mum and Dad when they were younger
than I am now showing pink and white flesh
in their skimpy bathing costumes
on a beach, when they were happy ‘you can tell – oh so happy’ with the world as it appeared then. The poem veers to the present, to the inescapable knowledge that ‘the longer I lie here the more lethal’.
The vulnerability of being human and with a need for ‘illusion of control’ is captured powerfully in “Don’t Cry, Ida Belle”. The casual, unassuming start: ‘The bicycle with no wheels rumbles beneath me / so I’ve no need to look / to where I am going’ masks deeper, more serious issues from climate change to politics, the economy. The reference to Robert Johnson’s ‘last fair deal going down’ (“Roosevelt’s New Deal”) recalls the depression of the 1930s. And, ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ (the American Blues singer) takes us back to storm Christoph that brought heavy rainfall, snow, and widespread flooding to the UK in the winter of 2020/21. Issues that remain very much alive today.
There are poems, too, that evoke a wonderful a sense of fun. “Zoological Society of London” is one such: ‘Today they are weighing the inmates of the zoo’ but ‘the penguins will not peaceably queue / and antelopes shy and shiver out of line’ while ‘parrots tip defiant heads already heavily armed / with nut-cracking bills sensing a fight.’ ‘The pygmy hippo remains unconvinced’ that all this is being done ‘for the animals’ good’. The poem ends with news, glimpsed from a report ‘from the Gale Crater on the Martian surface / where the probe “Curiosity” has been weighing dust’. The delightful play on the word ‘cock’ in “Quick Ornithological Quiz” is another example:
today’s correct answer
is that cocks tend to favour fruit
(but are not averse to tackling meat)
that cocks cover great distances at twilight
(but always find their own way home
that cocks like to hang with clever people…
The uplifting goodness and humanity of a world where ‘two newborn toms pulled from a bin liner / on a conveyer belt to the recycling crusher: thank goodness there were eagle eyes’ (“Olly and Pepper Are Safe”) are distressing and uplifting in equal measure.
“My Mother’s Care Home Room (as Cleopatra’s monument)”, a poem from Crucefix’s pamphlet Walking Away leads us to face life’s heartbreaking reality. He keeps his vigil ‘with all the helpless-/ ness of a Charmian/ at the cooling feet/ of her brave Queen/ the asp flung down/ beneath the only chair/ there has ever been’.
In “Homespun”, we share the poet’s memory of his father standing in homespun, and his voice ‘(its elusive tone and uneven cadence) / I listen to learn if I can perhaps still / match myself to his pure present moment’. The loss of parents, with its bewildering array of questions and emotions, is an experience one is left to measure privately.
The last poem, ‘Marking A Zero’, evokes an unexpected sense of equanimity. The poem begins with the family’s journey, with trees ‘singing with thousands of green tongues’. Midway, when they stop to take a break, the son cries out ‘how he loves to hear/ the cicadas with their whirring’, which the poet fails to hear – though he can make out the far off and faint ringing of bells in their stone towers. He can ‘trace their ebb and shimmer/ folded through the interference of the breeze’. His son hardly believes him, the cicadas are so clear to him ‘as if it’s his own / surprise and shocking loss that I can / hear nothing of the singing in the grass’. The open-endedness of the poem is a powerful image of the transitory, even precarious, aspect of life, of things changing, of compensations one never expected. In the midst of this fragility, one encounters moments of transcendence; the poems powerful, understated, affecting.
Shanta Acharya’s publications range from poetry, literary criticism and fiction to finance. Her latest poetry book is Dear Life, recipient of a 5 star review and is an Editor’s Pick at Booklife (Publisher’s Weekly). ‘Acharya’s eighth book of poetry is a transcendent blueprint for healing in a ruptured world… addressing the spiritual needs of the present day… including one illuminating thread throughout (that) explores the poet’s awareness of self…’ Her previous collections include What Survives Is The Singing (2020), Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2017) and Dreams That Spell the Light. www.shanta-acharya.com
Mar 25 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Martyn Crucefix
Poetry review – OUR WEIRD REGIMENT: Shanta Acharya discusses Martyn Crucefix’s thoughtful and eloquent explorations of change and fragility
Our Weird Regiment
Martyn Crucefix
Shearsman Books
ISBN 978-1-83738-005-3
108pp £12.95
Martyn Crucefix’s eighth original collection of poetry, Our Weird Regiment, impresses with its deep awareness of many of the issues that confront us today. His poems hold us among doubts and mysteries, leaving us to meditate on the precariousness of our existence. His ability to find meaning in this precariousness penetrates ‘like a language / streaming over the dark gulf of the world // to pierce the obscure recesses of the mind.’ (“Masculinity”). Many of the poems set in ordinary, domestic life become occasions for metaphysical reflection.
A translator, reviewer, and poetry blogger, Crucefix has won prizes for both his translations and original poetry. A translator of Rilke (Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Change Your Life), Laozi (Daodejing), Huchel (These Numbered Days), Lutz Seiler (In Case of Loss), Jürgen Becker (Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium) among others, Crucefix’s own repertoire of poems has been enriched by this larger critical exposure.
“Descent from White Hill”, for example, is an English version of Li Po’s poem “Coming Down from Chung-Nan Mountain by Hu-Szu’s Hermitage”. Not something a reader would have known without the author’s note. Nor, perhaps, would the reader have read Li Po’s poem. The poem ends with: ‘and there is nothing / we know left to spoil / our brief forgetfulness / of that other world’
“On Southampton Street/ after Bertolt Brecht” is another example. It is a version of Brecht’s 1934 poem, “Der Orangenkauf”, one of his ‘English Sonnets’ probably addressed to Margarete Steffin (author’s note). Seeing his mother’s favourite flowers, chrysanthemums, Crucefix remembers ‘since last night you’re not here or any place’.
Crucefix’s versatility transforms conversations with friends into ‘Highly Commended’ poems such as “Maggots” which asks ‘the question that no-one ever / answers: what is it, what’s all this for?’ The two quotes that preface the book – ‘make music and work at it’ from Phaedo by Plato, and the extract from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, ‘… to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates’ offer insights, hints and guesses. Grafting his work onto diverse poetic traditions lend Crucefix’s writing an experimental edge.
Crucefix’s new poems (actually many of the poems in this collection were written before the publication of his seventh book, (Between A Drowning Man) evoke ‘an acute sense of decline and fall,’ along with ‘a sense of menace and insecurity in the environmental, political and personal spheres.’ The title poem, “Our Weird Regiment” ends with:
…a scattering of bones
assembles itself
in a heap at the gate
now beyond the gate
our weird regiment
lurches into the road
a swaying of skulls
and whitened knucklebones.
The poems in Between A Drowning Man also spoke of ways in which things fall apart. That image of a world in discord reaffirms itself here in no uncertain terms. The reference to Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal on the front cover of Between A Drowning Man evokes a deep sense of loss, ‘the pathos of old things passing away and no things coming’. The great past crumbling down, without being replaced by anything admirable, is palpable in the refrain: all the bridges are falling down. Broken bridges offer a metaphor for alienation, if not collision and confrontation, as a default landscape of our increasingly broken and fractured times. ‘The unearthed bones of the dispossessed gather together to march’ is how Our Weird Regiment masterfully expresses it.
The poems appear under three sections – 1. Ida Belle. 2. Flint. 3. Homespun. Sharply observant of himself and the world around him, Crucefix sets the scene with the first poem, a stand-alone one, “Heal Thyself”. By the time the Schools offered him a place to study medicine, he had
Fallen
to wandering streets
to stealing Everyman’s Selected Wordsworth
I was John Stuart Mill
hoping my soul
might be saved…
This set him free to follow his own path:
at least not imposed
not merely allowed
and if you want to live
deliberately first
you slit the shroud.
Though there are several good poets who practiced medicine, in Crucefix’s case his inability to do so has done him no harm. As a teacher of English, he had the best of both worlds. Examining contemporary life in all its flawed aspects, in language that evokes careful consideration, his poems are ‘more complicatedly troubled’ (John Greening with reference to Crucefix’s earlier work), capturing our troubled times.
‘I can talk of course’ Crucefix confesses in “Ping” (the first poem in Ida Belle) ‘but mostly listen’ even though ‘nothing can be simply what it declares’ (“How to Send a Plain Dispatch”). Yet, if you know “How to Listen In”, ‘the earth’s complex song / still buoys the city’. The simplicity and clarity of this message is uplifting. The realisation of change, of things not being as they seem, is captured tenderly in “Anniversary”, (a fine ecopoem that plays with notions of time, change, the environment) when the poet’s own happiness is
a picture stashed away still
of Mum and Dad when they were younger
than I am now showing pink and white flesh
in their skimpy bathing costumes
on a beach, when they were happy ‘you can tell – oh so happy’ with the world as it appeared then. The poem veers to the present, to the inescapable knowledge that ‘the longer I lie here the more lethal’.
The vulnerability of being human and with a need for ‘illusion of control’ is captured powerfully in “Don’t Cry, Ida Belle”. The casual, unassuming start: ‘The bicycle with no wheels rumbles beneath me / so I’ve no need to look / to where I am going’ masks deeper, more serious issues from climate change to politics, the economy. The reference to Robert Johnson’s ‘last fair deal going down’ (“Roosevelt’s New Deal”) recalls the depression of the 1930s. And, ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ (the American Blues singer) takes us back to storm Christoph that brought heavy rainfall, snow, and widespread flooding to the UK in the winter of 2020/21. Issues that remain very much alive today.
There are poems, too, that evoke a wonderful a sense of fun. “Zoological Society of London” is one such: ‘Today they are weighing the inmates of the zoo’ but ‘the penguins will not peaceably queue / and antelopes shy and shiver out of line’ while ‘parrots tip defiant heads already heavily armed / with nut-cracking bills sensing a fight.’ ‘The pygmy hippo remains unconvinced’ that all this is being done ‘for the animals’ good’. The poem ends with news, glimpsed from a report ‘from the Gale Crater on the Martian surface / where the probe “Curiosity” has been weighing dust’. The delightful play on the word ‘cock’ in “Quick Ornithological Quiz” is another example:
today’s correct answer
is that cocks tend to favour fruit
(but are not averse to tackling meat)
that cocks cover great distances at twilight
(but always find their own way home
that cocks like to hang with clever people…
The uplifting goodness and humanity of a world where ‘two newborn toms pulled from a bin liner / on a conveyer belt to the recycling crusher: thank goodness there were eagle eyes’ (“Olly and Pepper Are Safe”) are distressing and uplifting in equal measure.
“My Mother’s Care Home Room (as Cleopatra’s monument)”, a poem from Crucefix’s pamphlet Walking Away leads us to face life’s heartbreaking reality. He keeps his vigil ‘with all the helpless-/ ness of a Charmian/ at the cooling feet/ of her brave Queen/ the asp flung down/ beneath the only chair/ there has ever been’.
In “Homespun”, we share the poet’s memory of his father standing in homespun, and his voice ‘(its elusive tone and uneven cadence) / I listen to learn if I can perhaps still / match myself to his pure present moment’. The loss of parents, with its bewildering array of questions and emotions, is an experience one is left to measure privately.
The last poem, ‘Marking A Zero’, evokes an unexpected sense of equanimity. The poem begins with the family’s journey, with trees ‘singing with thousands of green tongues’. Midway, when they stop to take a break, the son cries out ‘how he loves to hear/ the cicadas with their whirring’, which the poet fails to hear – though he can make out the far off and faint ringing of bells in their stone towers. He can ‘trace their ebb and shimmer/ folded through the interference of the breeze’. His son hardly believes him, the cicadas are so clear to him ‘as if it’s his own / surprise and shocking loss that I can / hear nothing of the singing in the grass’. The open-endedness of the poem is a powerful image of the transitory, even precarious, aspect of life, of things changing, of compensations one never expected. In the midst of this fragility, one encounters moments of transcendence; the poems powerful, understated, affecting.
Shanta Acharya’s publications range from poetry, literary criticism and fiction to finance. Her latest poetry book is Dear Life, recipient of a 5 star review and is an Editor’s Pick at Booklife (Publisher’s Weekly). ‘Acharya’s eighth book of poetry is a transcendent blueprint for healing in a ruptured world… addressing the spiritual needs of the present day… including one illuminating thread throughout (that) explores the poet’s awareness of self…’ Her previous collections include What Survives Is The Singing (2020), Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2017) and Dreams That Spell the Light. www.shanta-acharya.com