Publisher's Synopsis
"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 Selected Poems 1991-2017 brings together works from all nine of her published collections, new poems and previously unpublished work.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
