Nightjars, lilies, beetles, poems by Stalin, Whitmanesque despatches from an American war, the flight of refugees, ambiguous revolutionary cells, Homer's Ithaca, the lives of Petrarch and Keats. Such items fill the table-top. But the boy does not climb to it. He does not clamber down and away. Despite everything, the boy seems prepared to stand there counting. The tensions that animate Martyn Crucefix's fifth collection are those between openness and closure, vulnerability and defiance, liberal and fundamentalist. Bearing the impress of his acclaimed translations of Rilke's Duino Elegies, this book moves towards an openness to experience that is always threatened by the facts of suffering. Less about what hurts us, more how we respond to it, the reader is carried towards an affirming, comprehensive vision that declares this, this is mineA.