Crystal

Utterly mesmerising. An intensely rewarding and spine-tingling experience. What pain underlies it is mitigated by so much love, rescue, hope and triumph. Only a real poet can take one from a walk with Cavafy amongst the stones of the Acropolis to the misery of Heston motorway services; from Colombian emerald mines to communing with T.S. Eliot’s ashes in East Coker… Cranitch takes the resources of landscape, science, philosophy, mythology and of course poetry and uses them not just to meditate on the cruel, sordid, terrifying and humiliating truths of addiction, but to do something more than meditate – to understand, to resolve and to transform. This is what poetry at its best and truest can do. A wonderful achievement. -- Stephen Fry
Tender and profound…honest and brave…propelled by a faith in the humane, in the redemptive possibilities of love… Crystal…adds to that library that attests to the human spirit’s ability to witness and endure and, sometimes at least, come out singing. -- Hisham Matar * Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return *