Attempts at Being

Synopsis

Often shifting and allusive, Croggon’s poems can convey the ‘strangeness of dream’.… The ‘stubborn voice’ is restless, impatient, exploratory – attuned to bedrock reality. Her 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 the price of being alive.… She can slip in and out of styles as readily as an amphibian slips from land to water.

Reviews of this Book

‘Often shifting and allusive, her poems can convey the ‘strangeness of dream’.… 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 the price of being alive.… She can slip in and out of styles as readily as an amphibian slips from land to water.’ —Australian Book Review

‘This is a poetry of changes, dissolvings, transformations, fluidity between inside and out, between people and nature.… Other starting points are the poetic tradition and musical forms – the ways that art works, what it can articulate and fail to articulate, the inexpressible, white space and silences, unfaithful translations.’ —New England Review

‘Alison Croggon … is one of the most assured of a new generation of Australian poets.’ —A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry