Now out from Salt Publishing: THEATRE by Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon's bold new collection, Theatre, uses a range of narratives,
fables, monologues and compressed lyrics to examine female identity and the
idea of divine experience. Stepping confidently between different registers
and a wide range of forms, Croggon's poetry shows a writer at the height of
her powers narrating a female world of folk tales, trials, challenges,
transgressions, and mythologies, where rites of passage are both linguistic,
spiritual and political, and where persona is stripped back to an essential
humility always journeying into fragile and impossibly beautiful worlds.

Available online at

*http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781844714186*<http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781844714186>

Alison Croggon's poetry is distinguished by passion, intelligence and an
intense moral honesty that does not consist of statements about things, or a
drawing up of attitudes to this or that, but of a commitment to
understanding the ways poetry - the language of poetry - enables us to
understand. We have, as she says, "perfected the technologies of harm" and
will most likely carry on doing so. But the same prose poem, History, goes
on: "In unguarded moments I found myself longing for the dazzling conceits
of civilisation to be actual, for the profound and bloody pleasures which
underlay them." The marvellous sequence that ends the book, Translations
from Nowhere, itself ends with "an eyelid / snapping open, dazzled, full".

That fullness and that dazzling characterise all work.

- George Szirtes

Theatre is the apt title for such poems. Alison Croggon is gifted with a
rare capacity, negative capability: not so much, as for Keats, one that
allows the poet into the life of the sparrow on the gravel, but a capacity
to feel her way into the voices of others, from Iseult or Sor Juana to the
uncanny, unhomed voices of Translations from Nowhere. But as with the best
theatre, it is Croggon's care for language, its singularities and its
musics, that makes these poems inimitable. Through it all, an ummistakeable
note is sounded, wrapping through the many voices the tones of joy and
desolation, water and wind on stone.

- David Lloyd

To the mere spectator, it might appear that in this Theatre the poet is
delivering her lines. She is not! This is a theatre in which there is no
script, no actors, no representation. It is a place of first principles,
born from, and belonging to, the poet. From her stage there come no answers,
indeed, no questions. The latter are for you to ask yourself when you
realize and understand the complete lack of pretence in her words – "if I
have been asleep" –

And like Alison Croggon, responsibly, I also want to wake up, remove my
masks, my costumes, and step out into the generative presence of real life.
Clearly, it is the poet's language that allows this. She knows that the
spotlight is never on the stage but, rather, on the audience: Her art's only
illumination is what it illuminates in you.

- MTC Cronin

** <http://epc.buffalo.edu/poetics/welcome.html>