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Alison CroggonTheatre |
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Biographical note: Alison Croggon is an award-winning poet, novelist and critic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has published four full poetry collections and several chapbooks, and her theatre texts and libretti have been performed at major festivals around Australia. She is Melbourne theatre critic for the Australian and She is also the author of the epic fantasy series, The Books of Pellinor, which has been published to critical and popular acclaim in the UK, the US, Germany and Australia.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844714186
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description/annotation: Alison Croggon's bold new collection, Theatre, uses a range of narratives, fables, monologues and compressed lyrics to examine female identity and the idea of divine experience. Stepping confidently between different registers and a wide range of forms, Croggon's poetry shows a writer at the height of her powers narrating a female world of folk tales, trials, challenges, transgressions, and mythologies, where rites of passage are both linguistic, spiritual and political, and where persona is stripped back to an essential humility always journeying into fragile and impossibly beautiful worlds.
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Excerpt from book: The Gift
Previous review quote: Alison Croggon has from the beginning of her career demanded attention (gaining an entry in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 1994, on the strength of one book). She is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today. David McCooey
Previous review quote: One of the most assured of a new generation of Australian poets… Her work is remarkable for its technical awareness of earlier poets… There is always a strong physicality about her writing… a constant feeling of lyrical sensuality. Geoff Page
Previous review quote: Croggon continually surprises and delights with an almost eerily fresh outlook on events and emotions. Never is this poet more intriguing and enigmatic than when she moves into more esoteric poetic landscapes… Her startling imagery and unique word combinations inject a sharp twist to the ordinary. [She is] at the very forefront of modern Australian poetry. She remains a uniquely-voiced, assured writer very much in control of her craft. Ian McBryde
Previous review quote: Despite the increasing prominence of poets such as Peter Boyle and Peter Bakowski who have the same love of metaphor and a comparable level of rhetoric, Alison Croggon is now, with this second book, an even rarer voice in Australian poetry than she appeared to be in her first, This is the Stone. With Croggon there is always a strong sense of the female – in the love poems, the poems for her children and more generally. There is almost always a powerful appeal to the senses of touch and smell, even while she is being intensely metaphysical. Geoff Page
Previous review quote: In these poems, there is a feeling of being in a world without end, without resolution, albeit with much love; and in the way of dreams, it gets you in. Helen Harton
Previous review quote: This is not a bleak book. The ‘stubborn voice’ is restless, impatient, exploratory – attuned to bedrock reality. Poems are often carried forward by sheer rhythmical energy and, if the nature of the anguish that often informs them can be hard to pin down, it’s because anguish is seen as a price of being alive when emotions are strong. Andrew Sant
Previous review quote: It is in the supra-personal realm that these two most interestingly experimental poets [MTC Cronin and Alison Croggon] of the experimentalists seem to be going. Their lyric "I" is not the often vapid, dull but clever "I" or lack of it that often prevails in some curiously passive male poetry. Both Cronin and Croggon accord with Tielhard de Chardin who, in The Phenonenon of Man, states: "To be fully ourselves it is … in the direction of covergence with the rest that we must advance – towards the other"… [They have] a poetic voice flexible enough to avoid the fixity and biographical connection that makes the first person problematic. … These poets transcend sexual difference. They also transcend the lyric "I", not by defusing it in a polymorphous voice, but by being innovative in a different way from the American Language poets. They accept the solipsism of existence and the consequent emotive authority of the self as the traditional core of what constitutes poetry. Yet they are profoundly liberated from the oppressive politics of the narrow self. Patricia McCarthy
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