An English Nazareth

Impelled by a sense that our personal, social and corporate behaviours grow ever more infantile, these are poems that scrutinise the child, the child-like and the childish.

Writing with humour, candour and disarming precision, Crucefix's fourth collection reflects the innocence and distress of modern childhood, its often bewildering transitions into the adult world where egotism, anger and acquisitiveness wait. "An English Nazareth" calls up an extraordinary cast of real and fictional characters - Alexander von Humboldt, Mr Marvel, Lady Richeldis of Walsingham, Wimbledon referee Alan Mills, Radovan Karadzic, the Cleverly boy - and in doing so these poems further extend the formal and tonal range of a writer whose work confronts us with the truth 'of innocence already dead, the book's sole intent to show it had to happen.