Alison Croggon



Catherine Noske Reviews Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon has worked across many forms in her career, and connections to several are represented in these pages – the nine-part poem ‘Specula’, for example, comes from a larger work of the same title which also involves an essay and a radio play.

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rising from aquifers

In the middle of the map they put Medea. As if to say of the site DO NOT ENTER. As if to admit how they had provoked her. HAZCHEM: a warning almost invocation. Lord of the poison, sacred their mission. …

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Where are the dark woods?

they were always there from the beginning infant eyes open and blink on them the world as it always was unredeemed by history abashing childsight in a whitening room and other quotidian amputations flaring distantly now a starry abstraction inflamed …

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Where are the dark woods? (after Alison Croggon)

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Silence Turned into Objects: Looking at where Poets Write

Among the most extreme, in the sense of horrific, writing places for poems bequeathed to us would be the conditions in which Ezra Pound produced The Pisan Cantos. There is some speculation as to the exact number of those Cantos …

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Flash Bulbs in the Dark: Women are Dynamite

The poetry canon does women few favours. Over the years, I’ve had to seek out and find my own choice femmes to balance out the bookshelves. Never feeling the pull of Plath or Dickinson, I went from Sappho to Aphra …

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On Creative Commons II

The notion that poetry is primarily self-expression has often seemed to me a seductive (but conveniently commodifiable) mistake. We all like to think that we are makers of language, but anyone poking around in the engine of poetry uneasily realises that it is just as likely to be the other way around, that just as DNA shapes our morphology, language is the shaper of our consciousness.

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Angela Meyer Reviews Alison Croggon and Lucy Holt

Of the two chapbooks under review, Lucy Holt's exquisitely crafted poetry in Stories of Bird pecks at single moments, both from an intimate as well as a bird's-eye view. Her use of symbolism is focused and sensory. Hers are deep and personal poems, with some empathetic politics, that draw the reader in. Alison Croggon's chapbook Ash, on the other hand, speaks with a more despairing voice.

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Sor Juana

Freely constructed from a letter by Sor Juana de la Cruz the letters of the good mothers are drenched in secular eloquence if all the limbs of my body were tongues I could not publish such excellence they do not …

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Breakages

there are breakages certainly although bone can withstand more pressure than reinforced concrete the psyche has its own architectures which pay little heed to gravity an entire city can be populated on foundations little bigger than an ant I have …

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Justin Lowe Reviews Alison Croggon

Early last year, John Kinsella, man of letters and chief editor of Salt Publication, published his selection of Michael Dransfield's poetry through UQP, simply titled Retrospective. This old Dransfield acolyte couldn't fault it, and I have been waiting for an opportunity to proclaim that for six long months. So what's the occasion, Justin? I think I have just stumbled across Dransfield's successor:

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Kate Middleton Interviews Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon was the 2000 Australia Council writer in residence at Cambridge University. Her work takes on a variety of forms including poetry, prose and texts for theatre.

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