Poetry review – WALKING AWAY: Jean Atkin is touched by Martyn Crucefix’s gentle remembering of his ageing parents
Walking Away
Martyn Crucefix
Dare-Gale Press (2025)
ISBN 978-1-9159-68-13-5
25pp £8
This is a beautifully designed and produced pamphlet from Dare-Gale Press, a pleasure to hold in the hands. The greater part of Crucefix’s slim book is devoted to the title poem in the form of a sequence of haiku, which offer condensed thoughts and memories from that hard place in life, when parents become frail.
The haiku sequence is bookended by a longer poem at the beginning, and two at the end. The first, “Video Call”, consists of two twelve-line stanzas which introduce the reader to Crucefix’s elderly parents. The poem first evokes ‘that familiar image/ of a banking Spitfire beyond their shoulders’, a marker of the war that ‘bound them sixty years together’. But then we are fetched to the difficult present, the ‘struggling to unmute’, and ‘sometimes the laptop screen/ is angled so I catch only the crowns// of grey heads’. I found this poem beautiful in its restraint, and poignant in the son’s awareness and kindliness towards narrowed and repetitive older lives – ‘still talking blithely asking me still/ if I can see these crocuses’.
The haiku sequence begins by exploring a measure of years in the forty foot height of a tree ‘a willow you once carried home’ – and then the essential smallness of ‘This week’s new dosette box/ Grey windows not yet broken’. Limitations appear on every side, the poet says simply ‘I’ve no map to your mind’. Tea grows cold, a clock ticks, memory and recognition fades. Then a marvellous, terrible haiku –
You invent a new language
A shrew’s paw in a trap
A bubbling sound in your throat
I notice each haiku has either the first or last of its three lines separated by a line from the other two. This simple technique adds indicators, sometimes of time passing, or of a change of view or direction – and serves to deepen the reading experience.
Confusion is suggested by simile – ‘As at a level crossing/ Days pass’ and then that line space before ‘Who are the other passengers?’ The struggle to cope with the passage of time, to mark time, is repeatedly explored – in the days crossed out in black on a large print calendar, for example, or ‘Scratching of the same mouse// Morning and evening/ The central heating comes on’.
Though capital letters provide shape to the haikus, the absence of full stops is striking, and feels appropriate, suggesting drift, a lack of definition. The son, the carer, is an observer of small acts and the struggle against loss of agency:
This at your right hand is dirty
Soon on the left what is clean
Clarity at the sink
The haiku sequence makes us familiar with the house – ‘Dining chair and the coffee table/ Shifted here and there’; and the microwave ping; and ‘A scuffling in the eaves’.
Mirrors repeat their presence: in the son’s old room are ‘Mirrors you never find empty’; and again ‘Four mirrors in the wardrobe doors/ Four versions of yourself’; and again ‘Mirrors see and repeat forever/ Their angles change’. Old age is a time of reflection, but also of the narrowing of view.
The weight of responsibility has fully passed to the son, who because the road runs beside the railway line, looks ‘towards the fast-moving train// I know it’s a risk.’
The final haiku expresses the inevitability of the situation, and how life continues too.
Time – I can’t persuade you of it
Your parents walking away
The felled apple tree in blossom
The pamphlet concludes with a poem for the poet’s mother, created ‘as Cleopatra’s Monument’ a narrow obelisk of words: ‘a blue plastic jug/ its blue plastic cup… ‘a glint on the foil/ of today’s medication’. And propped in bed ‘an Easter Island profile/ gaunt and beaked’. The poet keeps vigil ‘with all the helpless-/ ness of a Charmian at the cooling feet/ of her brave Queen’.
For his father, the rhythmically beautiful ‘”In This Quiet One-way West Country Town”, in which the long father and son relationship is examined.
It’s closing time along the pavements where
we walk at half past five hand in hand
as you never did with your own father
(hand in hand as the two of us never did either)
Yet this is the place ‘where you were happiest’ and the calm, or at least the regularity and quiet endurance of these lives is gently respected, as the poem ends with traditional words of comfort:
now it’s closing time
all across this quiet provincial one-way
west country town turning for home before dark.
Martin Crucefix tackles this hard experience in most people’s lives with honesty, tenderness and great sensitivity. His poetry is unobtrusively crafted, and his graceful phrasing never hesitates when faced with the losses and indignities of old age.
Nov 10 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Martyn Crucefix
Poetry review – WALKING AWAY: Jean Atkin is touched by Martyn Crucefix’s gentle remembering of his ageing parents
Walking Away
Martyn Crucefix
Dare-Gale Press (2025)
ISBN 978-1-9159-68-13-5
25pp £8
This is a beautifully designed and produced pamphlet from Dare-Gale Press, a pleasure to hold in the hands. The greater part of Crucefix’s slim book is devoted to the title poem in the form of a sequence of haiku, which offer condensed thoughts and memories from that hard place in life, when parents become frail.
The haiku sequence is bookended by a longer poem at the beginning, and two at the end. The first, “Video Call”, consists of two twelve-line stanzas which introduce the reader to Crucefix’s elderly parents. The poem first evokes ‘that familiar image/ of a banking Spitfire beyond their shoulders’, a marker of the war that ‘bound them sixty years together’. But then we are fetched to the difficult present, the ‘struggling to unmute’, and ‘sometimes the laptop screen/ is angled so I catch only the crowns// of grey heads’. I found this poem beautiful in its restraint, and poignant in the son’s awareness and kindliness towards narrowed and repetitive older lives – ‘still talking blithely asking me still/ if I can see these crocuses’.
The haiku sequence begins by exploring a measure of years in the forty foot height of a tree ‘a willow you once carried home’ – and then the essential smallness of ‘This week’s new dosette box/ Grey windows not yet broken’. Limitations appear on every side, the poet says simply ‘I’ve no map to your mind’. Tea grows cold, a clock ticks, memory and recognition fades. Then a marvellous, terrible haiku –
You invent a new language
A shrew’s paw in a trap
A bubbling sound in your throat
I notice each haiku has either the first or last of its three lines separated by a line from the other two. This simple technique adds indicators, sometimes of time passing, or of a change of view or direction – and serves to deepen the reading experience.
Confusion is suggested by simile – ‘As at a level crossing/ Days pass’ and then that line space before ‘Who are the other passengers?’ The struggle to cope with the passage of time, to mark time, is repeatedly explored – in the days crossed out in black on a large print calendar, for example, or ‘Scratching of the same mouse// Morning and evening/ The central heating comes on’.
Though capital letters provide shape to the haikus, the absence of full stops is striking, and feels appropriate, suggesting drift, a lack of definition. The son, the carer, is an observer of small acts and the struggle against loss of agency:
This at your right hand is dirty
Soon on the left what is clean
Clarity at the sink
The haiku sequence makes us familiar with the house – ‘Dining chair and the coffee table/ Shifted here and there’; and the microwave ping; and ‘A scuffling in the eaves’.
Mirrors repeat their presence: in the son’s old room are ‘Mirrors you never find empty’; and again ‘Four mirrors in the wardrobe doors/ Four versions of yourself’; and again ‘Mirrors see and repeat forever/ Their angles change’. Old age is a time of reflection, but also of the narrowing of view.
The weight of responsibility has fully passed to the son, who because the road runs beside the railway line, looks ‘towards the fast-moving train// I know it’s a risk.’
The final haiku expresses the inevitability of the situation, and how life continues too.
Time – I can’t persuade you of it
Your parents walking away
The felled apple tree in blossom
The pamphlet concludes with a poem for the poet’s mother, created ‘as Cleopatra’s Monument’ a narrow obelisk of words: ‘a blue plastic jug/ its blue plastic cup… ‘a glint on the foil/ of today’s medication’. And propped in bed ‘an Easter Island profile/ gaunt and beaked’. The poet keeps vigil ‘with all the helpless-/ ness of a Charmian at the cooling feet/ of her brave Queen’.
For his father, the rhythmically beautiful ‘”In This Quiet One-way West Country Town”, in which the long father and son relationship is examined.
It’s closing time along the pavements where
we walk at half past five hand in hand
as you never did with your own father
(hand in hand as the two of us never did either)
Yet this is the place ‘where you were happiest’ and the calm, or at least the regularity and quiet endurance of these lives is gently respected, as the poem ends with traditional words of comfort:
now it’s closing time
all across this quiet provincial one-way
west country town turning for home before dark.
Martin Crucefix tackles this hard experience in most people’s lives with honesty, tenderness and great sensitivity. His poetry is unobtrusively crafted, and his graceful phrasing never hesitates when faced with the losses and indignities of old age.