Crystal by Ellen Cranitch review – a devastating insight into drug dependency

The poet’s uncompromising second collection, about her husband’s addiction to crystal meth, is fascinating and troubling

There is always the temptation to tell it like it wasn’t when a subject is painful. Words can tinker therapeutically, be balm, re-dress – and redress. What impresses most about Ellen Cranitch’s courageous second collection, Crystal, on the subject of her husband’s addiction to crystal meth and its devastations, is her steady rigour in not compromising, not ranting or taking flight, as in her poem Trust, which is claustrophobically reduced to an exchange of glances and a lack of boundaries. There is, throughout, a – crystal – clarity.

Her unexpected starting point is three lyrical poems about Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his model Renée, who killed herself when he married Marthe, and who is painted in an increasingly abstracted way in the works she is considering. “It is a terrible feeling, to be becoming less distinct,” she observes. There is a slight weirdness in her empathic starting point if only because it borders on a love song to herself: “that strange image I must own” who is “all iridescence”.