The Lovely Disciplines

Poet Martyn Crucefix’s new collection, The Lovely Disciplines, steps straight into a contemporary world where cursors blink, people Skype, consult Google Street View, make erotically-charged visits to the opticians, find ATM receipts in secondhand books of poetry. Such acuteness of observation is one of the ‘lovely disciplines’ in these vivid, exploratory poems that surprise and delight with portraits of a motor-biking boy-racer, strange meetings at Heathrow and images from Crucefix’s native Wiltshire: a toll cottage, the West Kennet long barrow, the weir at Tellisford.