Book of the Month
  

August 2003

M.T.C. Cronin: beautiful, unfinished
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. Isbn 1-876857-29-3. 103pp, pb, £8.95 / $12.95).


It will be no surprise to anyone who's read issues 54 and 55 of Shearsman that I've become very interested in Ms Cronin's work, though I only encountered it for the first time fairly recently, notwithstanding several books published in her native Australia. I only have one of those volumes (My Lover's Back), which is not entirely representative of her work as a whole. There is however some question as to what representative might mean in the context of her work; she ranges across a number of styles, using whatever seems most appropriate to the task at hand, ranging from the straightforward to the gnomic. In My Lover's Back, the 79 love poems are light, and mostly direct, touching utterances; in <More or Less Than>, parts of which appeared in Shearsman 54, an altogether more exploratory, questing tone is apparent, a style in which you get the sense that the unfolding of the poem might well be as much a surprise for the poet as for the reader. This new book from Salt is more in the latter style, as you might expect from Salt by now. The odd-looking title is that of one of the final poems in the book's fourth and final section; the subtitle is derived from the four sections that make up the book: Parable on the Erotic Struggle With True Muteness (How We Speak); Seven Mysterious Songs; Cantos Minus Melody; Better, Everything (Poems). Each of those might have made a wonderful title for a book, in fact.

Now, Margie Cronin has written a lot, and seems to write fast, something that is sometimes looked at askance, as if it's not done for a true artist to knock off fine work too often and too consistently. Blame the Romantics for this, and the starving man in the garret versus the jobbing versifier of earlier years; blame it on angst-ridden Beethoven versus glorious, and fluent old Haydn (who merely invented, more or less, the forms that we now recognise as Symphony and String Quartet, and then proceeded to write 104, and 77 of them respectively). This 77-part Parable that opens the book carries the dates 26-31 October 2000; quite an impressive feat to do this in 6 days, especially when it's this good:

XIX
I want your death
to love me a bit sadly
Sleep on it
Put your head down on the fruit
and rot with the child
Youth is catching up with us. Get up!
We can sing of lies as we go.


or


XLII
You never write again
What you have written
The night is under my skin
Like long grass it grows
Like want it grows
I am fishing in it
With the hook of morning

 

The 77 poems that make up this sequence are single statements, fragments and impressions that have been put together to make a quilt-like and powerful whole. It's a lyrical sequence about love and communication, about feeling and being in the world, and about nothing at all, about epiphanies and the measure of experience, the impossibility of expressing the truth of experience. These parables are parabolic.

The Seven Mysterious Songs seem unlike songs, but are more incantation, prayer and celebration, with a touch of the surreal unifying the mysteries of the whole. Cantos Minus Melody is another dangerous title, cantos recalling towering figures from the past and 'minus melody' an odd confession for a poet. What there is here however is more parable, and a quite liberating fluency. There's an air of mystery and surreality about this section too, with poems such as Canto of the Lemon Orchard, which reminds me of East European post-folk poetry, albeit without the disguises that that kind of work had to wear for political reasons:

The leaves are turning sour in the lemon orchard
and every green looks for the bedroom of funeral
rites and the water jug to put love to its lips
What we complain about is this silly curve of life
of something you can't eat and Sunday lunch
on the table they set up under the trees
But the trees are trees and relinquish nothing
to the celebrations scheduled in this beautiful
and bitter place as the late trickles on
And not even children trawling round with plastic
bags can pick enough lemons to relieve the sky
of its heaviness and continual summoning
I turn to my lover again not to speak but to find
we are in the non-lovers' orchard where we can no
longer touch and where only speaking can join us
There is silence only breath and hard fruit

 

beautiful unfinished is a book of tremendous riches, and a quite exhilarating power. Ms Cronin is one to follow – no doubt of that.

See some of M T C Cronin's work in Shearsman 54 and Shearsman 55.

Some of the above text will also appear as a review in the print version of Shearsman 56, due for publication in late August 2003.
Text copyright © Shearsman Books, 2003.
The poems quoted are copyright © 2003 by M.T.C. Cronin.

The Book of the Month series was founded on the Shearsman website at the end of April 2003, with the aim of highlighting certain significant publications that the editor has found particularly exciting. Books of the Month have been selected for earlier months of the year, retrospectively, and one of the 12 chosen volumes will be Book of the Year in December 2003. Click on the months below for other Book of the Month selections in 2003.

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