In Possession of Loss

This is poetry that goes direct to that other place and inhabits it. in possession of loss has a clear sparseness almost a minimalism that is also highly complex. Read as a single book-length poem it thinks our world without telling openly. As in Inger Christensen's Alphabet everything hangs together and speaks the whole though one can't exactly say how. Cronin is a risk-taker: she can say 'love' 'loss' 'death' 'the heart' without tying the words to recognizable stories or hiding behind the game of avoiding meaning. This is a poetry that shoulders the big questions. Compared to so much that iswritten in the English-speaking world Cronin's poetry IS so different and so itself. -Peter Boyle