BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 15-Apr-03 | ISBN: 1876857293 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 116pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

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.

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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

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

“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

“She is a time and space traveller on a grand scale …” —Barry Hill The Australian

“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

“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

“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

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).