Alison Croggon
Alison Croggon Poems
Such possessions as gore me pontificate from corners.
I am no longer solid but a speech of butterflies.
How it spills, when all is said and done:
It is hard to see virtue in the cold matter
...
Sometime, leaving this violent vision,
I’ll sing up joy and glory to assenting angels.
Let none of the clearstruck hammers of my heart
fail against softening, uncertain or
...
One thing to sing the beloved. Another, alas,
that hidden guilty rivergod of blood.
Her distantly known boy, her lover, what does he know
of the lords of lust, who often, out of his loneliness,
...
Every angel is terrible. And yet, alas,
when I hear of you, deadly birds of the soul,
I desire you. How long since the days of Tobias,
when one of the radiant would stand at the plain front door,
...
Who, if I cry, hears me among the angelic
orders? and even supposing one of them seized me
suddenly to his heart: I’d vanish
in his violent presence. For beauty is nothing
...
Branch I pick up from the edge of the woods
Only to abandon you at the world’s end,
Hidden among stones, in the shelter
Where the other path invisibly begins
...
Why, when it approaches, the interval of life
surges forward, as laurel, a little darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on every
leaf edge (like a smiling wind) -: why then
...
With all its eyes the creaturely sees
the open. But our eyes are
as if reversed and placed all round it
like snares ringing its free departure.
...
Woo no more, no wooing, outgrowing voice,
be your natural cry; your cry pure as the bird
when the heightening seasons lift him up, almost forgetting
that he is a pitiable animal and not just a single heart
...
O trees of life, where’s winter?
We are not one. Are not intelligent
as flocking birds. Outstripped and late,
we hurl ourselves into sudden winds
...
it is easy to forget me
I am a cloud in the corner of your eye
that vanishes in your direct gaze
when the rain comes
...
victory sweetened not your crimes
you lived enough lives to witness
the betrayal of beauty
which was difficult
...
Love may not exist, it may be
only a word, it may do nothing
useful. To erase love
is easy, it forgets itself, its weapons
...
I marvelled at the squid’s mantel,
The sloth’s curled hook,
The magenta lips of orchids.
...
I will stop writing and walk out, and in the clamour of commerce I will consider the value of truth.
...
it was the sound of a bird
startled from sleep its wings hurting the air
it was a sound like shame
...
The woods were beautiful as always, but dry.
It seemed a subtle poison at the roots
drained them imperceptibly of life.
A want, or heightened colour, in each leaf
...
gently we are saved:
your body formed
from bodies so long grieved
by mine is warmed
...
In the age of barbed wire, they announced the death of God. Great men traced the flyspots on ancient walls and studied the mutations of stars. Never before was so much knowledge gathered together.
...
Alison Croggon Biography
Alison Croggon (born 1962) is a contemporary Australian poet, playwright, fantasy novelist, and librettist. Life Born in the Transvaal, South Africa, Alison Croggon's family moved to England before settling in Australia, first in Ballarat then Melbourne. She has worked as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. Her first volume of poetry, This is the Stone, won the Anne Elder Award and the Mary Gilmore Prize. Her novella Navigatio was recommended in the 1995 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and all four novels of the fantasy genre series Pellinor have been published. She also edits the online writing magazine Masthead and writes theatre criticism. Croggon has also written libretti for Michael Smetanin's operas Gauguin and The Burrow which premiered respectively at the 2000 Melbourne Festival and Perth Festival, produced by ChamberMade. Other poems by her have been set to music by Smetanin, Christine McCombe, Margaret Legge-Wilkinson and Andrée Greenwell. Her plays have been produced by the Melbourne Festival, The Red Shed Company (Adelaide) and ABC Radio. Career Her poetry has been published widely in anthologies and magazines in Australia and overseas. Her most recent poetry publication is Theatre (Salt Publishing 2008). Other titles include Ash (Cusp Books, Los Angeles 2007); November Burning (Vagabond Press Rare Objects Series, Sydney, 2004); Mnemosyne, (Wild Honey Press, Ireland, 2001); The Common Flesh (New and Selected Poems) (Arc Publications, UK, 2003) and Attempts at Being, (Salt Publishing, UK, 2002). Her first book of poems, This is the Stone, won the 1991 Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes. Her novel Navigatio, published by Black Pepper Press, was highly commended in the 1995 Australian/Vogel literary awards and is being translated for publication in France. Her second book of poems, The Blue Gate, was released in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Poetry Prize. Attempts at Being was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and also was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the US. She has toured frequently in the UK and the US, among other things reading at the Poetry International Festival at Royal Festival Hall in London, the Soundeye International Poetry Festival in Cork, and the New Writing symposium at the University of East Anglia. In 2000 she was the Australia Council Writer in Residence at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge (UK). Alison Croggon is also the author of the acclaimed young adult fantasy quartet, The Books of Pellinor. The first volume was nominated in two categories in the Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction in December 2002 and named one of the Notable Books of 2003 by the Children's Book Council of Australia. The series has since been released to critical and popular acclaim in the US the UK, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Poland. The audio edition is in preparation for the US and Australia/New Zealand. Alison has to date written and had performed nine works for theatre. Her theatre work includes the operas Gauguin (Melbourne Festival 2000) and The Burrow (Perth Festival, Sydney, Melbourne 1994-95 and broadcast by ABC Radio), both with Michael Smetanin. Her performed plays include Lenz (Melbourne Festival 1996), Samarkand and The Famine (Rules of Thumb season, Red Shed Company, Adelaide 1997 and ABC Radio 1998), Blue (CIA, La Mama, Melbourne and the Street Theatre, Canberra, 2001). ABC Radio commissions include Monologues for an Apocalypse (2001) and Specula (2006). She also wrote lyrics for Confidentially Yours (Playbox Theatre 1998, Hong Kong Festival 1999). Many of her poems have been set to music by various composers, including Smetanin (Skinless Kiss of Angels, Elision New Music Emsemble), Christine McCombe and Margaret Legge-Wilkinson (Canberra New Music Ensemble) and most recently Andreé Greenwell. She was a member of of the 2005 and 2006 Artistic Counsels for the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, and in 2009 was one of the members of the Arts Stream for the Australia 2020 Summit. She was poetry editor for Overland Extra (1992), Modern Writing (1992-1994) and Voices (1996) and is founding editor of the literary arts journal Masthead. She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and three children.)
The Best Poem Of Alison Croggon
Goodnight, Sweet Prince...
Such possessions as gore me pontificate from corners.
I am no longer solid but a speech of butterflies.
How it spills, when all is said and done:
It is hard to see virtue in the cold matter
Staining the floor - frills, cups, leaves, arquebuses,
Bile - the gross litters of meaning - the new king
Knitting up this mess in his brainless sinews,
Mere presence the answer to everything, the golden
Halo of a new dawn impressing all the peasants.
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