New and Selected Poems 1991-2017

by Alison Croggon

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and Selected Poems 1991-2017 brings together works from all nine of her published collections, new poems and previously unpublished work.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

Genres: Poetry

330 pages, Hardcover

Published August 1, 2017

About the author

Alison Croggon is the award winning author of the acclaimed fantasy series The Books of Pellinor. You can sign up to her monthly newsletter and receive a free Pellinor story at alisoncroggon.com

Her most recent book is Fleshers, the first in a dazzling new SF series co-written with her husband, acclaimed playwright Daniel Keene. Her latest Pellinor book, The Bone Queen, was a 2016 Aurealis Awards Best Young Adult Book finalist. Other fantasy titles include Black Spring (shortlisted for the Young People's Writing Award in the 2014 NSW Premier's Literary Awards) and The River and the Book, winner of the Wilderness Society's prize for Environmental Writing for Children.

She is a prize-winning poet and theatre critic,, and has released seven collections of poems. As a critic she was named Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year in 2009. She also writes opera libretti, and the opera she co-wrote with Iain Grandage was Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the 2015 Art Music Awards. Her libretto for Mayakovsky, score by Michael Smetanin, was shortlisted in the Drama Prize for the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. She lives in Melbourne..

Reviews

[Mariah Wamby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alison Croggon has been my favorite author for years, but due to my irrational fear of poetry I avoided this aspect of her work for a long time. Poetry has always intimidated me, and I was so afraid of reading something by Croggon that left me feeling alienated.

I needn’t have worried. This collection was stunning and now I want to lose myself in this (for me) unexplored genre.

My only criticism would be the placement of the piece “On lyric” which is the last piece to appear in this collection. This piece affirms again and again that poetry is full of contradiction and will be understood differently each time it is read. I wish that this had been the first piece in this collection, because it helped ease a lot of the fears I had felt while reading the rest of the work.

I’m excited to dive back into this treasure trove with fresh eyes now that I’ve read “On lyric.” and would suggest for any readers who are wary of poetry to at least seek out this one piece of Croggon’s work.