M.T.C. Cronin has been among the most prolific Australian poets over the course of the last three decades, having published more than twenty volumes of poetry since her debut collection Zoetrope: We See Us Moving in 1995. Her poetry has won a number of Australia’s major literary awards, including the prestigious Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize.
Cronin has a background in law, and while she rarely, if ever, refers directly to her legal work, her poetry often draws parallels and incongruities between law and poetry, their distinct styles, languages and processes. In a 2009 lecture, Cronin asked if, as a test of poetry’s worth, we should apply to the poem Ann Scales’ statement on law as a social tool: “It is only extrinsically important, its actual value depends on its success in promoting that which is intrinsically valuable.” Cronin’s answer was an emphatic no: “Poetry’s purpose is not to provide solatium. Poetry’s purpose is not to get there, and poetry is neither extrinsically nor intrinsically important. Poetry is not a tool… its purpose is unintended and its purpose is undesigned… All that is undecided lives in poetry, and this aids decision.”
The Audited Heart
Words went up to the front and fought and were wounded
And died and returned home and were paralyzed –
The slippery survivors parsed together so that we may listen
To their swords
The clatter
That's where the teeth are, not in the mouth
But in the hand, stretching out for the heart behind it
This cage of holy acceptance
The race to the bottom of that red place
Snake, that thing, that turns there
Settled under the chest because there is only war here
Violence on the coast
In the corridors
The country designing itself, vacant and threatening
Without need to measure the space between this word
And my last
The present grows smaller and smaller
As the future grows larger and larger
The Australian's book was written
Following an oath taken never to write
Again. Everything
Had too much importance,
Too little
I do not want to rest my fate on the ordinary,
On security – I want to talk to everyone!
But God is not a parent
Not a mother or a father
And you must also look beyond my voice
To hear my voice authentically
Even I, who did it, must search for evidence of what I did –
So tired that there is no occasion I will rise to
Nothing intimate in my movements towards the world
I cannot rest on my own hand
Beauty, even of clouds, alerts me
To the partiality of the flower
I have held the smallest man's hands
The strength still in them, of a giant
And
Raising my laugh to the level of a physical characteristic
Say: Don't be restless with others' love
For these organs, these unreliable means of detection
Are the very ones which find the major violations
Like that three-eyed fish running
In the river behind our homes
The Story Of Someone Who Knows Nothing
Betraying no journeys, what might be is visible from here
The colours as new as the ones you see all the time
I am horrified by the fact that I am not in a war
(and there are wars)
Do I want an epoch to happen
So that my poetry may have some place to suffer
And become golden?