A third collection, A Madder Ghost (Enitharmon, 1997), drew on material unearthed in genealogical research ten years earlier. 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 . . . allowing two languages distanced by history and syntax, to swim together in single poems".Vrona Groarke, P N Review 119 (1998) The book was praised by Anne Stevenson: "It is rare these days to find a book of poems that is so focused, so carefully shaped and so moving".Anne Stevenson, blurb for A Madder Ghost Kathryn Maris also praised it as "urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful"Kathryn Maris, Poetry London and Gillian Allnutt thought the poems timely in their engagement with "proactive fatherhood" in ways that were "tender, humorous and . . . profound".Gillian Allnutt, Poetry Review
