Many poems are first-person narrative explorations of Self with an unsettled temporary quality, re-enacting and questioning scattered existence. Some less ambitious poems work particularly well, such as ‘The Hunter’ and ‘The Farewell’, while the title poem ‘Bestseller’ imagines entering a world of success – ‘All this trouble for the pit? I asked’.

Within each book, Cronin has shown a variety of styles, from the direct protest of ‘Counting to Eleven’ to her vigorous re-workings of, and homages to, Akhmatova and Lorca as in ‘Umbilical Cord of the Poet (Eulogy for Federica Garcia Lorca)’.

But this and several other poems have been reprinted from previous books. Alison Croggon, another contributor to the Meanjin poetics forum, pleads for an ethics-based poetry. Cronin defends something more visceral – ‘but there is no insistence, only / the undirected beauty of writing / drawing its own picture / not yours’. Although cleaving to inspiration, she also subverts this idea through a mixture of fake solemnity and sudden slips into comedy, for example in this brash use of assonance – ‘if she was here you would bite off her / kiss leaving a hole in her cheek and kissless / with your itchy lips you’d laugh’. Yet among such lines, there are also banalities and unnecessary statements: ‘Do snails sleep? / There is a bad trend in politics to speak badly / And in platitudes’. Like Judith Wright, Cronin is good on coupledom – ‘the double dream that was dreamed / from our coupled sleep’ – but some of these poems waver into practised naiveté:

Yet, wet feet leave wet prints

what burns, burns and air is the column

around which the body is built.

neither ‘the quip modest’ nor ‘the reproof valiant’, as Shakespeare’s Touchstone puts it. Again, too many poems seem enthusiastic but sketchy, perhaps just forgivable in a first book, but less so in a fourth collection.

In the longest poem, ‘Mischief-Birds’, an extended ars poetica, the narrator exhorts: ‘Take pleasure in / resistance! Revel in the simultaneity of / beauty and turmoil! … Let your / art flow from your best intentions – you / cannot reveal the truth, but only create it.’ These thwarted traveller’s tales are sometimes fabulous, sometimes realist. ‘Mischief-Birds’ cameos Horace, as well as leaning on Baudelaire’s ‘Le Voyage’, but where Baudelaire’s descriptions ignite the dictionary and enact argument – the wide-eyed kid with a colourful map becomes the dissatisfied adult, 7-Up in poetry –  Cronin’s poem jumps with humour as the narrator finds each form of transport less than ideal:

… I want an historical sky;

a sky that knows me when I walk into it …

and perhaps it would have been better to

walk for even poets who have won prizes

are not welcome drunk at 40,000 feet, and

when you begin reciting from work in

progress … It’s as if temptation was compulsory for these people, and spits, Artists!

Exaggerators!

Perhaps it is true, as Paul Muldoon also said recently, that writers have the least facility with words and, hence, an obsessive need to order language, because language always seems disordered and unfixed. Cronin’s work, however, subscribes to the notion of Inspiration – Art as a force of nature – rather than any willed or intellectual construct. ‘As a method … I have decided not to be aware that what I am writing is poetry.’ Her poetry possibly illustrates this method. Cronin’s theory, then, proposes a poetry requiring something less than, or other than, total awareness from the poet.