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."About the Author: Martyn Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published five collections, and his translation of Rilke s "Duino Elegies," published by Enitharmon in 2006, shortlisted for the Cornelius M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as unlikely to be bettered for very many years ("Magma")."