“Alison Croggon is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.”
– Australian Book Review
Raw, passionate and dazzling, Alison Croggon’s poetry confronts a world fractured by different kinds of violence – patriarchal, colonial, sexual and emotional – and finds there a difficult beauty. Selected Poems 1991-2017 brings together works from all nine of her published collections, new poems and previously unpublished work. It demonstrates the full range of her art: formally inventive, intellectually curious and stylistically assured.
“It is in the supra-personal realm that these two most interestingly experimental poets [MTC Cronin and Alison Croggon] 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 accord with Tielhard de Chardin who, in The Phenonenon of Man, states: `To be fully ourselves it is...in the direction of convergence with the rest that we must advance – towards the other’. They have poetic voices flexible enough to avoid the fixity and biographical connection that makes the first person problematic. ...These poets transcend the lyric `I’, not by defusing it in a polymorphous voice, but by being innovative. 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, Agenda
“Alison Croggon’s poetry is distinguished by passion, intelligence and intense moral honesty.”
– George Szirtes
Author Biography:
Alison Croggon’s poetry has been widely published in journals in
Australia and internationally, and is included in many major Australian anthologies. Her first poetry collection, This is the Stone, won the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes. The Blue Gate was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Poetry Prize. Attempts at Being was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the US. Her poetry has been set to music by several composers and she has written many libretti, including
Mayakovsky, for an opera by Michael Smetanin, which was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Awards Drama Prize, and The Riders, for Iain Grandage, which was named Choral/Vocal Work of the Year in the Australian Art Music Awards.
She is the author of the popular fantasy series The Books of Pellinor. Other novels include The River and the Book, a finalist in the WA
Premier’s Awards and winner of the Environmental Writing for
Children Award; Black Spring, a finalist in the NSW Premiers Literary
Awards; and Navigatio. She is also a performance critic, and in 2009 was named the Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year. She lives in
Melbourne, Australia, with her husband, the playwright Daniel Keene, with whom she is co-writing a new speculative fiction series.
Her previous poetry collections are Theatre (Salt Publishing 2008), Torque (Ahahada Press, 2008), Ash (Cusp Books, Los Angeles 2005); November Burning (Vagabond Press Rare Objects Series, Sydney, 2004); The Common Flesh: New and Selected Poems (Arc Publications, UK, 2003), Attempts at Being (Salt Publishing, UK, 2002), Mnemosyne (Wild Honey Press, Ireland, 2001); The Blue Gate (Black Pepper Press, 1997) and This is the Stone (Penguin Books, 1991).
For more information visit alisoncroggon.com
