Cronin has a marvellous gift for both subtlety and original metaphor, and the layers of meaning in many of these poems unfold tantalisingly, in much the same way as an unopened rosebud does. She is also prolific; she has published twelve collections since the early 1990s, many of which have been awarded or shortlisted in major prizes. Her individual poems have appeared so consistently in both national and international journals over this period that she has become one of Australia's best-known poets in a relatively short time.
As humble appreciations for the dedicatees, some pieces are more effective than others. It's clearly easier to appreciate references to well-known individuals (Vincent Van Gogh, Judith Wright, Walt Whitman) than those known only to the poet and her inner circle, and sometimes there's not enough detail in the latter to let a reader into this world of personal relationships. If the detail sometimes doesn't translate, though, the emotion invariably does, and some of these poems left me with more of a 'sense' than a 'meaning'.
It seems to be de rigeur in much contemporary poetry these days to heark back to the work of others in a reverent and oblique fashion, as though there are only a certain number of ideas or writing styles in the world, and these are endlessly rehashed and editorialised upon. To a lay reader with little knowledge of contemporary poetry and its various 'star' proponents, there'd be little evidence of what path to take through the verbiage to find something approximating meaning - and little encouragement to try to create any totally new or innovative ways of saying something. Though it's a truism that there's nothing new under the sun, and I'm not averse to obscurity, or writing that appeals only to an initiated elite, I can't help longing for simple, honest, pithy words that stand for something concrete.
When Cronin does this, the results are powerful and memorable. 'Sweet Violet' (p.100), a poem for one of the poet's daughters, was one I found particularly affecting, with its beautiful images describing the blueness of the child's eyes and recalling the facts of her birth: 'Her blue eyes are the tiniest whales / ever to displace a sea. / She looks through everything I own / and takes what makes her smile. / ... / Sometimes I think of the purple cord that joined us / the plant cut at the hour of your birth / and wonder if you would like to gather / in a bucket all my broken waters'. 'Veronica' (p.106) contains strong descriptions of a woman (the poet's mother?) on her deathbed. Direct and unambiguous, these few short lines manage to encapsulate an entire personality.
'Wisteria (sic)' is also direct and impactful, describing an effort to create a private bower in a garden, an act that both satisfies and thwarts a sense of aesthetics ('... I now have a life there / that no one knows about. / ... / I move the furniture - / a table and two chairs - / around to face the sun / and then break my heart over the arrangment.' ). 'Flannel Flowers' (p.27) recounts a conversation between a tree and a stream (' ... said the stream I spoke / with a fountain about sunlight and stone'), and contrasts this appreciation of the reality of nature's perfection with the people in the council chambers, tossing around 'ideas about the countryside'. In 'Slipper Flowers' (p.93) appears this arresting imagery: ' ... my spine / made a circle as if remembering / the inside of my mother's body: / I don't know who she is but she folds / her ovaries over my skull like a secret pillow' (though I had some problems with 'I don't know who she is' naysaying the truth of the descriptor 'my mother'). I was also taken with 'Poppies' (p.85), a poem about the aftermath of war, in which appears the clever but unexpected description of the 'hard corners / of the square we are in when we hate'.
Other poems are concerned with the search for meaning, both linguistically and poetically, as well as in life and inevitable death. When these work, the reader is led down a philosophical path strewn with arresting imagery and 'big questions'. The title poem (p.121) asks the reader: 'Do you recall the world? Place your hand / on the place where it was cut from you and you / will know what pushes us to leave meaning'. 'Everlasting Daisy' (p.25) states: '... it is as if I want / to out-death death / but still our bodies are haunting / space , trying / to invest with meaning all that is meaningless.' The poet aspires to humility ('I work on my ego / which is blocking the view / my mind strains to see.' - 'Giant Asphodel', p.39), but also to commune with the meanings created by others ('... Poems / have shadows too. Falling across / bridges of words, leaving thoughts / coloured by another's shape and / size. Sweeping up doesn't help / with this sort of thing.' - 'Leaves, p.53).
Rodney Hall describes Cronin's book as 'beautiful, contemplative poems ... questions asked at the brink of the abyss' - which leaves me wondering exactly which abyss we're talking about. Is it the abyss of death and annihilation? Or an intellectual abyss, in which the collection in its totality appears to be important and meaningful, but individual poems, when viewed singly, seem to be mere exercises in thrall to an idea? Although I was much taken by the spirit of the governing notion in this collection, (and there are individual moments of great power within many of the poems), I'm not convinced that the idea's execution is completely effective. This kind of writing can be alienating, as readers grapple with what the intended meaning is at the expense of those delicious moments when reader and writer actually communicate across time and space via the medium of the page, and converge in their understanding - as in some of the pieces discussed earlier.
When ambiguity creeps in I was left feeling that I was merely witnessing a series of word games. It's hard to make sense of passages such as these: 'What is night? Where is night? / But do not search for what this story / is about for what it is about, for those / thoughts that slip cleanly and smoothly / from one to the next are for stories / themselves.' ('Impatiens', p.46 ). In 'Seed' (p.91) the poet states: 'I give it meaning / therefore I take it away' and searches for 'words that are more than echoes'. In 'Sun-Jewel' (p.98) the author contemplates a 'split pine twinning itself for the sky / of day / because the day needs two trees / and the night none' - though why this would be so is not explained.
There's more incongruity in 'Three Pear Trees' (p.103), which opens with the line: 'The dead pear tree is in flower' and, later, opines 'Once in a lifetime distance watches what is near'. These inconsistencies of fact (How can a dead tree flower? How can 'distance' watch the near?) create a feeling of nebulousness, of fence-sitting and saying neither one thing or another, as if the point of the poem is to state: 'I say something but I say nothing - but I say it very cleverly'. For me, this takes the work into the dangerous territory of 'poetry for poets' that is inaccessible to a general reader. When Cronin avoids hindering her meaning with such ruses her raw words are more than capable of conjuring beauty and profundity in equal measure.
(Reviewed by Liz Hall-Downs, June 2007)
