Alison Croggon has from the beginning of her career demanded attention
(gaining an entry in The Oxford
Companion to Australian Literature, 1994, on the strength of one
book). She is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.
I think I have just stumbled across Dransfield's successor... This book [Attempts at Being] will dictate what many of us do as poets in the unfolding decade, mark my words.
Croggon continually surprises and delights with an almost eerily fresh outlook on events and emotions. Never is this poet more intriguing and enigmatic than when she moves into more esoteric poetic landscapes... Her startling imagery and unique word combinations inject a sharp twist to the ordinary. [She is] at the very forefront of modern Australian poetry. She remains a uniquely-voiced, assured writer very much in control of her craft.
It is in the supra-personal realm that these two most interestingly experimental poets [MTC Cronin and Alison Croggon] of the experimentalists 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 Cronin and Croggon accord with Tielhard de Chardin who, in The Phenonenon of Man, states: "To be fully ourselves it is ... in the direction of covergence with the rest that we must advance - towards the other"... [They have] a poetic voice flexible enough to avoid the fixity and biographical connection that makes the first person problematic. ... These poets transcend sexual difference. They also transcend the lyric "I", not by defusing it in a polymorphous voice, but by being innovative in a different way from the American Language poets. 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.
Australian
Book Review
I think I have just stumbled across Dransfield's successor... This book [Attempts at Being] will dictate what many of us do as poets in the unfolding decade, mark my words.
Cordite
Poetry Review
Croggon continually surprises and delights with an almost eerily fresh outlook on events and emotions. Never is this poet more intriguing and enigmatic than when she moves into more esoteric poetic landscapes... Her startling imagery and unique word combinations inject a sharp twist to the ordinary. [She is] at the very forefront of modern Australian poetry. She remains a uniquely-voiced, assured writer very much in control of her craft.
ArtStreams
It is in the supra-personal realm that these two most interestingly experimental poets [MTC Cronin and Alison Croggon] of the experimentalists 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 Cronin and Croggon accord with Tielhard de Chardin who, in The Phenonenon of Man, states: "To be fully ourselves it is ... in the direction of covergence with the rest that we must advance - towards the other"... [They have] a poetic voice flexible enough to avoid the fixity and biographical connection that makes the first person problematic. ... These poets transcend sexual difference. They also transcend the lyric "I", not by defusing it in a polymorphous voice, but by being innovative in a different way from the American Language poets. 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.
Agenda