Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Luke Beesley reviews three new poetry collections by MTC Cronin, Jordie Albiston, and Michael Farrell

by
June–July 2020, no. 422

Luke Beesley reviews three new poetry collections by MTC Cronin, Jordie Albiston, and Michael Farrell

by
June–July 2020, no. 422

If I were to make gauche generalisations about the poetics of MTC Cronin, Jordie Albiston, and Michael Farrell, I might respectively write conceptual, technical, and experimental. But these established poets – each in their fifties, highly regarded – display fluency with all these descriptors, especially in their latest books.

God Is Waiting in the Worlds Yard by MTC Cronin Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 210 ppGod Is Waiting in the Worlds Yard by MTC Cronin

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 210 pp

In God is Waiting in the World’s Yard, Cronin’s twentieth collection, contemporary gothic imagery is gruesomely and artfully tossed against the edges of its prose poems. Let’s talk about these edges. Other than the free-verse poem ‘Sitting Worldside’ on the first page (where we find a sleeping kitten), all of the poems on the left-hand side of this collection’s spine have a rusty right-ragged margin. These poems have different titles: ‘The Brunt of God’ or ‘God Has a Stroke’, etc. They are sometimes blackly comedic and present a ‘sociopathic god’, a flippant, lazy god, a ‘philanthropic eponym’, a reflection.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.