Published predominantly by Enitharmon Press, his work ranges widely from vivid and tender lyrics to writing that pushes the boundaries of the extended narrative poem.
His themes encompass questions of history and identity (particularly in the 1997 collection A Madder Ghost) and – influenced by his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke – more recent work focuses on the transformations of imagination and momentary epiphanies.
at Worcester College, Oxford, writing on the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Enlightenment and Romantic theories of language.
[10] His first book, Beneath Tremendous Rain (Enitharmon, 1990) was published two years after he had been featured by Peter Forbes in a ‘New British Poets’ edition of Poetry Review.
This collection contains his elegy for his friend, the poet and food writer, Jeremy Round, as well as the four part poem 'Water Music' and an extended meditation on language, love and history titled 'Rosetta'.
[11] Anne Stevenson wrote: "Poetry these days, often feels obliged to place conscience over art and make language work for precision, not complexity.
This had revealed that Crucefix's ancestors to be of Huguenot origins, fleeing France in the 1780s to settle in Spitalfields, London, to continue the family trade of clock-making.
The book's tripartite structure opens and closes with sequences of fluent, lightly punctuated lyrics in which he explores the anxieties and anticipated pleasures of fatherhood, from conception through the first year of his son's life.
Genealogical material forms the middle section and looks to the past for identity, continuity and new ways of understanding the present in a tour de force of narrative interweaving that Vrona Groarke described as "a brave experiment .
[17] Kathryn Maris also praised it as "urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful"[18] and Gillian Allnutt thought the poems timely in their engagement with "proactive fatherhood" in ways that were "tender, humorous and .