M.T.C. Cronin

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Biographical note:  MTC Cronin has published fourteen collections of poetry (including several in translation), the latest being The Flower, The Thing, UQP, 2006 and her work has won and been shortlisted for many major literary awards both in Australia and overseas. Cronin has studied arts, law, literature and creative writing and after working for the decade of the nineties in law, began teaching writing in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. She currently lives in Maleny (Queensland, Australia) with her partner and three young daughters and is completing her doctorate – The Catastrophe of Meaning – described as writing on poetry, law, justice and desire. Cronin has three collections of poetry forthcoming (Irrigations (of the Human Heart) ~ fictional essays on the poetics of living, art & love, USA; Our Life is a Box. / Prayers Without a God, Australia/Thailand; and Notebooks of Signs & 3 Other Small Books, UK).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857295
ISBN-10:  1876857293
ISBN-13:  9781876857295
Author:  M.T.C. Cronin
Title:  beautiful, unfinished
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-03
Extent:  116pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  174 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  SHORTLISTED FOR THE NSW PREMIER’S AWARD. This wondrous book of parables, meditative cantos, mysterious songs, lyrical and exploratory poems mapping interstices between experience, emotion, and realization casts Zen-like nets – those of a boldly honest, brilliant Western heart-mind – and from there opens onto the palpable world that shapes and impels our lives.

Table of contents:
Parable On the Erotic Struggle with True Muteness (How We Speak)
Seven Mysterious Songs
I Belonging
II Loneliness
III Sleep
Half the Shadowed World
Shadow of a Unicorn
The Doorweb
IV Contraposition
Sun & Rain
Sun & Rain 2
V Fortuity
1. One Excuse
2. Two Ways of Arriving at Surrealism
3. Three Times Around the Moon
VI Authorship
VII Conduit
Cantos Minus Melody
Canto of Faces
Canto of Morning & Magdalena
Canto of the Coming of Night
Canto of the Heavy Eagle
Canto of Three Guitars
Canto of Silent Men
Radio
Song of Bone
Canto of One of the Teachings of Ick ’Ben ’Barley ’Ham
Canto of Pearls
Canto of the Lemon Orchard
Canto of Being Completed by the World
Canto of Titles for Navigators
A Whale’s Eye
Lost at Sea
The Blood, The Day
Le Paradis
Canto of the Namesake
Canto of an Ant
Canto of Unreachable Prayers
Better, Everything (Poems)
Beginning
Better, Everything
The Ideas of Me
Escape
The Point Along the Way
‘Dog’s No Buddha,’
We
Thornbushes
‘Once, the Leaves’
You Can Not Speak
Tiny Voices
The Plate
The White Bats
In Seeing (Zen Sonnet)
I Know What That Thing Is
From a Tin
‘Moths Hit the Walls’
Age-Fox
My Armpits, Smell of Salt
Exegetic
Classical Banana
The Lookout
The One-Pointed Star
The Companion
The Prayer
What Fights Us
Beautiful, Unfinished
End

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Excerpt from book:  

Canto of Three Guitars

for V.M.

And as we heard
the three guitars

we heard a voice
which came from them

It was the hand deformed by movement
and crying the life of the hand

Every grief
needs happiness

Like the dragonfly’s single day of life
coming to rest in my palm

Wings invisible with flight’s speed
and whispering only the centre of this word -

Hum – rests in air
like courtesy and passion twined

Warm and shy
in love with the simple earth

Behind all grief
is happiness

and I see your face -
its vibration

In love
notes like this are found

The delicate insect’s fluorescence
flying, lighting the spiders

Review quote:  I can stick to straightforward words of praise, such as brilliance of technical address and originality of utterance, when describing her verse.

Peter Porter
The Age

Review quote:  She is a time and space traveller on a grand scale …

Barry Hill
The Australian

Review quote:  This ‘unfinished’ collection by M.T.C. Cronin is better than almost all of the polished, earnest Australian collections I have read in recent years. She is a genius of poetry. Many of her poems intentionally baffle expectations set up in the first lines; others link apparently unrelated images and hint at their conjoined possibilities; still others invite you to search for their meaning in other poems or places outside the text. Even her most fragmentary or cosiest-seeming pieces point skyward to meta-realms.

Stephen Lawrence
Journal of Australian Studies

Review quote:  All great books just tell you the story, all great poetry is a result of an artist capturing the truth, even if there is no story, the truth of our aloneness in the vast unknown. Beautiful, unfinished – parable, song, canto, poem is a masterpiece of music in words. Buy this book. Read it a whole bunch of times. It is a necessary addition to your brain-software in this techno-mystical age.

Brentley Frazer
Cordite Magazine

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

Tony Frazer
Shearsman