poetry
Jennifer Strauss
M.T.C. Cronin
Everything Holy
Balcones International Press US$12.00pb, 83pp
1 891811 04 5
'THE WAY PEOPLE'S BODIES Mean the World': this ended my search through
Living underwater the pink and red
Hears it own arid beating drown
Everything Holy for that focusing phrase needed to kick-start a review, for whether the generic surface of these stylistically various poems is surrealism or social realism, they are charged with a physicality as recognisable and as ambiguous as the beard on the circus woman of 'Not a Real Beard'. It is a physicality that acts itself out in dramas of vulnerability and violence as mundane and terrifying as the scene in which the audience's doubting Thomas allowed to test the beard he questions, 'wraps/ his fingers through it and tugs/hard and laughing' in what is termed with wry conclusiveness an 'inventive rape'. It is a physicality that binds parents and children in an uneasy dynamic in 'The Confetti Stone', where the girl who has swallowed her father whole in swallowing the opal that was his gift, will next day 'marry her man on no sleep with a smile as wide as a barbed/ wire fence'. The physical is physically fraught in these poems and Cronin understands very well that its weight is not lessened by absence: the child drowned in the dam in Cronin's version of the traditional Australian theme of the lost child is still irremediably 'the small white body in a pink hat' ('Four Haunting Differences and a Pink Hat'). Nor is the gravity of the physical lessened by the fact that the horrors done by and to the bodies of others retains a degree of incomprehensibility. That incomprehension is met by a willed focusing of the imagination on the part of the speaker who askes incredulously 'Is it true they were ploughing the soldiers/into the ground?' or the one who rubs her bare toes over the tiles of the kitchen floor, wiggling all ten while she thinks of the family of eleven who in a world of 'Land mines and starvation and rape/ and torture only occasional,/blew themselves up with rat poison' ('Counting to Eleven:The Terror of Beauty'). The protagonist of 'The Sculptor', on the other hand, is driven to mimetic representation of her brother's violent suicide 'Because she can only see things/other people agree are there'.
Perhaps this makes Cronin sound too sombre, even didactic. She is too canny for the latter -- witness the prompt complication of the apparent finality of 'The Way People's Bodies Mean the World' by a qualifying 'Second Way People's Bodies Mean the World'. There are moments too when the physical is simply beautiful like the confetti stone, or mysteriously charming like the small red spider of 'Be Spider'; moments when physicality is a source of joy, when the 'value of my flesh is /measured in solemn perfection' ('The Prado'). Physicality can also be comical. 'Surrealism & Damages (or "Did I Come")' deploys the difficult form of the flowing short line adeptly in playful but sharp version of gender incompatability whereas 'Units' employs a tighter stanzaic form for its grotesque comedy of potential romance destroyed by the spectacle of nose-picking. (The wrongly placed finger is the marker of failure in both poems).
If there is tension in the relationship between the physical beings in Cronin's poetry, it is not very surprising that there should also be tension between the physical world and the language. Some of this is the traditional tension generated by anxiety about the poet's own expressive capacity:
The deepness of language
And the blindness of the diver
Who does not know which way
is up
mollusc of my heart
on the page
('the law of language')
In 'No Face for a Dragonfly' such anxiety merges with ethical uncertainty about appropriating the animal world to nourish 'human need and/personification'. And in the title poem 'Everything Holy' Cronin brings into play two different criticisms of the relationship between language and reality. One is a simplistic dismissal of the language of literature as 'unreal': 'life isn't holy/ Holy is a book you borrowed/ from the library'. The other appears to be a critique of that modern notion of language as the free play of signifiers (a notion that Cronin herself occasionally puts into practice elsewhere):
I could describe it
'Everything Holy' is not simple, but it has an imaginitive power that invites further exploration whereas some poems in the collection are too cryptic to generate even a primary gut response of bemused pleasure. There is, however, quite enough evidence in the collection as a whole to persuade us that this poised, witty and thoughtful performance augurs well for her next collection.
as being bodiless, the expectation
that I will believe his words,
as if the words, and not their meaning,
have intrinsic value