M. T. C. Cronin - Böcker

is Australian poet MTC Cronin's tenth book and her second British collection. A compositional tour de force, the sequence consists of one hundred poems, the line-count arcing from a single line in poem 1 to fifty lines in poem 50, and thence back down to a single line in poem 100. Like many forms, self-imposed or otherwise, Ms Cronin uses this apparently restrictive structure to support a wonderfully original unfolding of verse. Ms Cronin's work has been attracting enormous interest in both Britain and North America, and this volume will reinforce her burgeoning reputation.

Subtitled 'The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli' - a neglected 20th century poet much influenced by Celan and Vallejo - this collection represents the merging of two fine Australian poets into the consciousness of an other. Or An Other. Both authors worked on each individual text, and thus it is a true joint effort, not simply a kind of book-length renga. A remarkable departure for two of the finest poets from Australia's current middle generation.

"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