A Madder Ghost

A madder ghost haunts us all - in our resemblance to earlier generations, in the eagerly looked-for features of the newly-born. In Martyn Crucefix's startlingly original new book, this apparition is at moments glimpsed as a solitary wanderer, at others, a figure of confidence, proclaiming something akin to Shelley's Romantic 'madness' that nothing in the world is single. By turns shocking, honest, extraordinarily tender, separate poems are built, through a deft and exciting narrative control to sequences concerning the birth of a child, the illness of a father and a dramatic meditation on the author's own ancestry of persecution and exile.