AustLit

 (Publication summary)

 (Publication summary)

'The simplest of places that at every moment confronts with fresh ambiguities: ‘The world’s yard’: is it a tree-lined garden where children are playing? or the yard where a yardarm is erected, the executioner’s noose always dangling? or the boneyard where heretic and believer lie side by side to whisper their shared confidences? ‘Carnivorous laughter filters through the woods.’ Isn’t it always so?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Written over a period of two decades, The Law of Poetry contains poems that pay personal tributes to ‘things’—broccoli, ducks and concrete—as well as poems that seek to physically enter the realm of abstract concepts —chance, kindness and explanations. Set out in alphabetical order—as if a dictionary of essences—each poem is titled ‘The Law of Something’, be that ‘The Law of Absolutes’, ‘The Law of the Child, Lost’ or ‘The Law of Rubber Gloves’. The reader is asked not to judge—as law stereotypically demands—but to engage with this very idiosyncratic world of the individual poet and to be injected, like the shrunken travellers in the 1966 classic, Fantastic Voyage, into the nervous system of another.' (Publication summary)

'"This is poetry that goes direct to that other place and inhabits it. in possession of loss has a clear sparseness, almost a minimalism, that is also highly complex. Read as a single book-length poem, it thinks our world without telling openly. As in Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, everything hangs together and speaks the whole though one can’t exactly say how. Like Celan and Rilke before her, Cronin is a risk-taker: she can say 'love', 'loss', 'death', 'the heart', without tying the words to recognizable stories or hiding behind the game of avoiding meaning. This is a poetry that shoulders the big questions. Compared to so much that is written in the English-speaking world, Cronin’s poetry IS so different and so itself." —Peter Boyle

'"As a subconscious cousin to Paz’s notion that ‘we are an accident that thinks’; in possession of loss seems on the verge of asking if the reason why we’re here, is not necessarily a good enough reason to be here? But unburdened of the (unsaid) question, the language resuscitates – propelling itself with an off-kilter energy on a doorknocking process that unsettles accepted norms. M.T.C. Cronin creates poetry at the speed of thought. She continues her downward spiral in an upward direction, agitating the core, somehow binding its fibres into a rope we can all climb to access the compelling view that is her own way of thinking. Is language dropping markers for her to follow, or is it the other way round? Her method is unhindered and elemental. This book is structured in left and right hand planes; a counterpoise between titled poems on one side, and bracketed (though untitled) philosophical ampoules on the other. It can be read as a call and response rowing back and forth between riverbanks of alternate silence. In this way her poetry becomes a transmission, filling the page with air as if it were a lung. Cronin’s work allows us to ‘breathe between what approaches existence and what exists no more’. She tells us ‘all words are coffins reopened’. So as ever, death is present, but even a finality such as this risks impotence without the constant blink of new life. Nothing can remain closed. Nothing leaves." —Nathan Shepherdson' (Publication summary)