For
Ben
Ultrasound
Bird
Aria
Billie Holliday
Pause
Elegy for Children
Nights
Fugue
Ars Poetica
Ode to Walt Whitman
The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable Shop
Psalms out of Sickness
Angels
Saint Valentine
Lines on Human Grace
Lunar
Prayer
Shark
Sonnets
Cuneiforms
Bearing
Muse
Limbo
Song
Elysium
Riddle
Fairytale
Notes
Sonata
Divinations
Back to top
Reviews
Borders
and Crossings
The Blue Gate
Katherine Gallagher
Poetry
Review, Vol. 89,
No. 1, Spring 1999 (pgs 83-85)
[Text not yet available]
Back to top
The Blue Gate
Adam Aitken
The Australian’s Review of Books,
The
Australian, Vol. 3, No. 8, November 1
998
Of these poets, Alison Croggon is the most self-consciously analytical
and philosophical, almost old-fashioned; Coral Hull [
How Do Detectives Make Love?]
is
the most political, a poet with a mission.
Emma
Lew’s
[
The
Wild Reply]
approach is the least traditional and probably the hardest to grasp:
there is little desire to define identity, or use poetry as a vehicle
for social protest.
The idea of self as the body defines it, alternately constructed and
undone by eros and agape, is the primary site of consciousness in
Croggon’s
The
Blue Gate. Her
language hugs close to sensuality and eroticism. It’s as if
she has
treated the white page as the skin: a permeable site of interchange
between ourselves and the realm of animate and inanimate matter.
This is a book about love’s complexity, its tyrannical
pressures, its
crisis points, its controlling force. As mother and poet she asks
‘who
has given birth? and who is born?’. Giving birth is joyful
but also
catastrophic, breaking the mother’s sense of boundaries,
tearing skin
and organs:
I am
waiting
for what emerges
from the white edges
of catastrophe
that last bleeding note.
Perhaps poetry compensates for the body’s pain, and the fear
and
silence we experience in the absence of God.
The Elizabethans, Whitman, Dante, Rilke, the Latin American surrealists
are Croggon’s influences. But too often her high style relies
on a
restricted range of well-worn tropes. At times, she fires off strident
assertions: ‘Our language is a bitter struggle towards the
child’s
speechlessness. / We fail, always.’ If you agree with this,
following
the permutations of this book’s ‘endless
garden’ will lead you to its
primary question: how can poetry escape solipsism and still express the
self, when ‘all the names you mine out of silence / retreat
into the
sounds of themselves’?
Back to top
Review
The
Blue Gate
Ian McBryde (poet)
ArtStreams,
June/July 1998
Alison Croggon’s inaugural 1991 Penguin collection of poetry,
This is the Stone,
made a
deservedly clean sweep of the literary prizes for a first book, most
notably the Mary Gilmore and Anne Elder awards.
In the intervening years she has published plays, libretti, critiques,
translations and a novel, Navigatio, released in 1996. It is therefore
with mounting interest that fans of Croggon’s work have
looked forward
to
The Blue Gate,
her second
collection of poetry, from Melbourne’s courageous and
prolific Black
Pepper Press.
From the opening lines of ‘For Ben’, the first poem
in the collection,
Croggon’s highly individual poetic voice lets us know that
she is back
with a poignant delicate timeliness. The themes of her work range from
the observations of mothering and children/childhood to adult
relationships, love, lust, dreamscapes, and other more veiled,
mysterious subject matter.
She has an uncanny knack for approaching even so commonplace a routine
as shopping with original verve and her own stylised approach, as seen
in the poem ‘The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable
Shop’.
Who else could end a piece about picking up groceries with such growing
excitement, in a rush of exclamation marks and lines such as
‘...the
marriages which await them! The lips that moisten to meet them!
Glorious speeches of the earth!’? The poem
‘Nights’ is a series of
monochordal lines assembled together in five sections, containing such
gems as ‘immense flowers bruise your horizons’,
‘my hands have lost
courage’, and ‘speech is so fragile, it is as if we
have never spoken’.
Croggon continually surprises and delights with an almost eerily fresh
outlook on events and emotions. Never is this poet more intriguing and
enigmatic than when she moves into more esoteric poetic landscapes, in
pieces such as ‘Angels’,
‘Fairytale’ and ‘Ars Poetica’.
Her startling imagery and unique word combinations inject a sharp twist
to the ordinary. The collection ends strongly with
‘Sonata’, a long
poem in fifteen sections which, while ostensibly about elements of
nature, angles out and away from that into other, deeper realms.
The Blue Gate
solidifies
Alison Croggon’s position at the very forefront of modern
Australian
poetry. She remains a uniquely-voiced, assured writer very much in
control of her craft. Hopefully, despite the current parlous state of
poetry publication in this country, we will not have to wait eight
years for her next collection.
Back to top
The Genius of the Reader (or
Who’s sitting
on the chair?)
Alison Croggon, The Blue Gate
Bev Braune
Southerly,
Vol. 58, No. 2,
Winter 1998
Alison Croggon dedicated her first collection of poems,
This is the Stone,
to ‘the perfect
reader’ in the figure of John Leonard, someone Gerald Prince
might
identify as the ‘ideal reader’, the observer of the
poem who
understands the overt and covert steps set up by the poet, someone who
has achieved more than what Stanley Fish would call
‘linguistic
competence’. Perhaps, this is Umberto Eco’s highly
educated and
literary reader (as must be Jonathan Culler’s), able to
determine
meaning from the state of closure or openness in a word. Or it may be
Hans Jauss’s reader - able to slide into a population of
endless
interpretations or perpetual ‘fusion of
horizons’
quite at home in the
skins of Hemingway as cast by David Reiter. However we define the
person who reads the poem, the poet has to be the best of readers
because the poet is primarily an inventor. Poets may use different
tools, vastly different formulas and blueprints. When we find a poet
with a unique formula, we often say we recognise ‘the
genius’ in the
invention, in the affirmation of the existence of a set of objects that
are as real as, say, a chair in a room...
You
open the blue gate
in the wall of stone
If the objects in a poem exist in the same way that a chair does in
another room into which we have not yet entered, and no less so,
discovering its existence is a matter of reading the map to its
position so that we find the chair. As the composer, the poet is the
first observer to enter the room and describe the chair to would-be
observers waiting outside the room but with little inkling as to how to
enter. The fun in finding it, for Alison Croggon in
The Blue Gate, lies
in the chase
itself. The chase restores her ‘to many things I lost: a
stone trough
filled with miniature flowers, the privacy of nests in bamboo thickets,
a tiny lawn always filled with the voices of books, a blue
gate’
(‘Notes’).
You
open the blue gate
in the wall of stone
and pass through the
dense
birdhaunted forest
‘Divinations VTH’
Croggon shares with Rainer Rilke the sheer joy of mining names out of
silence (‘Divinations XV’). She presents her first
clues to her world
through an epigraph taken from the first of Rainer Rilke’s
Duino Elegies. The
key phrase in
the epigraph is ‘
Denn
Bleiben ist
nirgends’- ‘For staying is
nowhere’. The Rilkean string, endured
by the quivering arrow, is to be found everywhere in
Croggon’s pursuit,
her musical background brought successfully to bear on each
‘pure
note’, each ‘last bleeding note’. Her
statements are simple and active,
following neat, reverential tracks to lists of questions, open-ended
answers - the interrogative without a mark. There is no promise in
The Blue Gate that
you will catch
up with her to sit with her on the chair in rooms made of stone or to
join the head of the hunt through ‘libraries of
skin’ (‘Aria’). Her
rhythmic territory is the highly polished, wobbly chair where the rings
of [Andrew]
Sant’s
[
Album
of Domestic Exiles] ancient
trees string the bow of her arrows to reveal love bloodied and divine.
Back to top
Wedding
the lyric, and the essay
The
Blue Gate
Geoff Page (poet)
The Canberra Times,
30 May 1998
Three alliterative words suggest the essence of Alison
Croggon’s second
book of verse,
The Blue
Gate
- metaphor, metaphysics and motherhood. It is easy to see why this poet
has sometimes been impatient in her reviewing of the more laconic and
mundane verse which tends to comprise our present poetic mainstream.
With Croggon there has to be something happening in every line. A
certain rhetorical level is quickly reached and maintained.
Among the more obvious, though by now well assimilated, influences on
her work are Whitman (for whom she specifically writes an ode), Pablo
Neruda and Dylan Thomas, all lovers of rhetoric, of catalogues, of
metaphor. Counteracting this perhaps are the more disciplined
metaphysics of Emily Dickinson. Three lines from Crog-gon’s
‘Ars
Poetica’ suggest the book’s dominant feeling:
‘Because you have tasted
your salt in the blood / of another’s mouth, because a small
flower /
is eating the history of stone’. It’s important to
note that Croggon
doesn’t actually name the flower. It’s always the
symbolic, archetypal
flower of metaphysical poetry and must remain so. There is no way in
which it can be a petunia or a dahlia.
Despite the increasing prominence of poets such as Peter Boyle and
Peter Bakowski who have the same love of metaphor and a comparable
level of rhetoric, Alison Croggon is now, with this second book, an
even rarer voice in Australian poetry than she appeared to be in her
first,
This is the Stone.
With Croggon there is always a strong sense of the female - in the love
poems, the poems for her children and more generally. There is almost
always a powerful appeal to the senses of touch and smell, even while
she is being intensely metaphysical. ‘Somewhere beyond
me’ she says in
the poem ‘Bird’, ‘is a wholeness, a
memory of being stone, although
this consoles nothing and explains nothing’.
Back to top
Books
Poetry in the
Matter-of-Fact
The
Blue Gate
Alan Gould (poet and author)
Quadrant,
Vo. 42, No. 5, May
1998
A tenuous link between the poems of Philip Hodgins and those of Alison
Croggon may lie in Rilke. Rilke’s death from leukaemia
explains his
presence above in Hodgins’ ‘The Change’.
The link is tenuous because I
doubt that Philip’s sense of his region and its
haeccitas would
have allowed him to
fully believe the last phrase of the quote from Rilke with which
Croggon’s
The
Blue Gate
commences:
Denn Bleiben
ist nirgends
(For to remain is to be nowhere).
In this, Croggon’s second collection of poems,
Rilke’s spirit - his
emergent philosophy of poetry as that which praises Existence, his
attentiveness to an art at once precise, sensual, yet (to my ear)
peculiarly forced and estranging - has evidently been absorbed by
Alison Croggon as congenial to her own stance toward the world and the
art of poetry. Indeed she pays homage to the German poet in the
fourteenth section of her ‘Divinations’, and the
first three lines
might be describing her own enterprise.
You
spoke out of that deep cleft,
sexed and unsexed, where
carnivorous
petals
caress the strangeness
of dream -
but what nocturnal
meetings
deliver you here,
emptied so finally
of yourself,
poet whose gaze was self
torn by sight
What follows in this poem is an interior, half-hallucinated landscape,
and while it is not life-drawing in the Hodgins manner, it is a
credible and properly fluid background on which to pay homage to the
German poet. She meets him, as she says, nocturnally, and many of
Croggon’s landscapes are nocturnal, the effect of this
darkness being
to narrow and intensify our sensation of the poet’s
singularity.
Rilke and his
Weltinnenraum
are one of her resources. The Elizabethans and metaphysicals are
another, with their confidence that wordplay, paradox, conceit, are the
wherewithal of passionate discourse. Take this from her sequence of
four ‘Sonnets’.
Let
me say without self-pity, that I love a man
who loves me more than
sanity can
bear,
who’s so
afraid he will our love abhor
and give to others most
of what is
mine.
What of his cock? What
of his private
kiss?
They’re mine
by right of pleasure and
of pain,
and should he prick his
gentle
braille upon
another’s
flesh, how blind is my
caress
which reads him true,
and feels
within his eyes
fidelity more deep than
his betrayal.
I like the forthrightness of this, its headlong, Donne-like enjoyment
of the argument. But more, I like its courage. It is brave, not only
for the unfashionableness of what it says, but for its welcome of the
idea that a tactful observance of the resources from within the canon
is no hindrance to making utterance fresh or insight topical. Like
Hodgins, Croggon does not repudiate a canon simply because some of it
has been curriculum, and this fact endows the works of both with a
sense of their being thoroughbred, of their finding strengths in the
art of their antecedents in order to make an art of their own that is
strong. These sonnets show Croggon at her most confident, I believe,
because the rigour of form, and her use of metaphor as the instrument
with which to argue, give her thoughts on the perplexities of love, or
the intriguing genetic echolalia of creating children, their edge and
temper.
There’s much in
The
Blue Gate
which treats the subject of conceiving, carrying, and giving birth to
children. As with Rilke, one has the sense in Croggon’s poems
that in
the very representation of multiform, blind Existence lies the praise.
Her gynaecological imagery in poems like ‘For Ben’,
‘Ultrasound’,
‘Bearing’, or the very elemental
‘Cuneiforms’, is persuasive in its
depiction of pregnancy’s sensuousness and vulnerability, its
associated
longings and anguish, its tense consciousness of self and the imminent
other self. She does allow herself some out-of-body moments, when the
fierce nucleus of the self relaxes into an interval for the celebration
of detached things. The poem called ‘Bird’ is one
such, as well as this
deft pastiche from Christopher Smart, where she conjures a particular
organic fruit shop:
I
will go walking... to the Elwood Organic Fruit Shop...
for mignonette purses
its frilly lips
and snowpeas pout their
discreet bellies and the
melons hug
their quirky shapes
under their marvellous
rinds.
for onions ringing their
coppery
globes and o the silver shallots
and the hairy trumpets
of leeks
for the cabbages folding
crisp linens
and the broccolis blooming
in purple tulles and the
dense green
skirts of lettuces...
‘The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable Shop’
For all the tense deliberation in the poems of
The Blue Gate, I
found two grounds
of dissatisfaction. Firstly, I became impatient wherever I felt the
densely metaphorical idiom was overstrained. In the fifteenth
‘Divination’, for instance, we are informed
...this
vine
winding our bones
rustles ceaselessly
in absent winds.
A vine rustling in absent winds? Is that ‘absent’
as in absent-minded
or as in absent? The adjective is careless of clarity and this
carelessness is symptomatic of a tendency throughout this volume. It
betrays, I suggest, a kind of lyric impulse too zealous for a
strangeness of sense, with the result that it deprives some poems of
common sense.
This aspect of the lyric impulse has the further result that
The Blue Gate
offers too little
relief from the poet’s private chamber. Certainly it is a
chamber
where, on occasion, the reader is given telling insights into the
immediacy and complexity of a particular woman’s experience
and
relationships. But elsewhere, in poems like ‘Muse’,
‘Lunar’, ‘Notes’,
‘Ars Poetica’, the imagery of private reference
confines and oppresses
the reading experience because the thick layer of metaphorical usage
restricts rather than liberates a meaning that we, the readers, can
share. We are let in, but not let out. This leads me to my second
discontent. There is a poem called ‘Pause’ which is
in the form of a
mantra about the simultaneities possible within the heedless moment.
Again the act of representing the overflow of reality in any given
moment is the act of celebrating that reality. And its haphazard has
some momentum:
Within
the undivided moments
A train stops on a bridge
A woman’s
finger touches the rim of a
man’s mouth
A child hides in a
secret place and
counts his collection of stones
A general tells his
soldiers that
justice is not possible...
...A lie becomes a truth
and then a
history...
A baby tastes an orange
for the first
time
A soldier stamps on the
hands of a
little boy...
...Magnificent lords of
cloud reveal
again
beauty no one can see.
It was the fifth, eighth and last lines I balked at. Sure, they were
plausible, but unfair. Does
no-one
see that beauty in the clouds, not even the speaker who draws it to our
attention? Then again, can our epoch
never
give generals any moral characteristics that will pleasantly surprise
us? I decided to change the lines round. Thus line eight became
‘A
little boy stamps on the hands of a soldier’, whereupon I had
a
reversal that was equally plausible, more arresting, and (I think) more
sociologically telling for such trouble spots in the world as Ulster or
Jerusalem.
Such tampering with a finished work is mischievous of me, but my
criticism of Alison Croggon’s poem, and a shortcoming in this
book
generally, is the lack of precisely this connection with quotidian
particulars. Hodgins’ poems have this connection,
occasionally to a
prosaic excess. But it is the attribute which allows a poet to
transform the matter-of-fact into the poetic. It is, if you like, the
point at which photo-journalism contributes to the personal vision.
So I find myself taken with many of the qualities of Alison
Croggon’s
poetry, the fierce independence of her viewpoint, her facility for
witty metaphorical argument and sensuous realisation, her dedication to
craft. At the same time I’m quite certain my interest would
have been
more fully engaged had the world’s matter-of-factness
infiltrated her
personal account of things to give the poetry an ampler sympathy and
justice.
Back to top
The Blue Gate
Gloria B. Yates
Social Alternatives,
Vol. 17,
No. 2, April 1998
First, don’t be put off by the drab cover. Black Pepper Press
should
realise that a boring glossy cover is wasted. Any class of HSC art
students offered a prize of fifty dollars would produce a better
picture than the purple square on a dark background which fails to
tempt you to open this book. Secondly, don’t be put off by
the inane
quote from Les Murray on the back. Almost anything he says nowadays is
regarded as holy writ, even these are nuisances. But the poem is
redeemed by its last verse where Alison Croggon speaks plainly,
effortlessly:
Yet
still I wish for you an inexhaustible love,
the fruits of every
season, a sure
voice to name them,
shelter when you seek it
and the
sixteen winds
to call you from
yourself back to
this first ocean...
The second poem, ‘Ultrasound’, is better -
‘I’ve seen its nameless face
/ lit on a sonar screen... the clean / bubble of its skull, its budding
fingers, / its black mouth innocent of words, / its coruscating
fearless heart.’ And the opening line from
‘Aria’ is unforgettable:
‘Because you love me, I fear the angels will be
jealous...’ The poem
‘Pause’ excels by using the simplest, most
effective images:
Within
the undivided moments
A baby tastes an orange
for the first
time
A soldier stamps on the
hands of a
little boy
A man loses his mind in
the endless
garden.
The four sonnets are excellent. They have the instant authority of the
greatest Elizabethans, though the themes are modern indeed. Perhaps
she’s missed her century. The temptation to quote them must
be resisted
because each line is so closely interwoven with the others that it
would be an offence not to present each sonnet in full. And as we read
on the book continues to irritate and simultaneously evoke admiration.
Some poems are so choked with images that one longs to shake the writer
and say, Wait! ‘before each breast unfolds into its hour of
light’ and
becomes ‘heavy grapes that swing aside their cloistered sun
from
inattentive lips’ - Hang on, what do think your readers are
doing? our
minds can’t jump around like jazzed-up kaleidoscopes. By this
bombardment of metaphors nothing is gained for reader or poet; we need
time to appreciate each image and trust the poet - you make it sound
too much like a series of conjuring tricks. Nevertheless sometimes this
plethora of imagery succeeds. ‘Lines on Human
Grace’ certainly hits the
jackpot.
So my favourite poem from
The
Blue
Gate is not one of those that
glitter with conflicting images but the lovely and totally original
piece, ‘The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable
shop’:
for
bawling children are solaced with grapes and
handled to leave no
bruises for the
man goes are soft
yellow thighs and the
strawberries
klaxons of sweetness...
for peaches like the
breasts of
angels and passion fruits
hard and dark and
bursting with seed
in your palm
for the dull gold flesh
of pontiacs
and knotty umbers of
yams and new potatoes
like the heels
of babies
for the tubs of sweet
william and
heartlifting freesias
and orchids as damp and
beautiful as
clitoral kisses...
how they nestle up the
vegetables,
promising them the
fruits of their ardour!
There is more, much more, in this poem. Read it and I guarantee you
will never pass by vegetables again without admiration. For many poets
can write of love and despair, but Alison Croggon is the only one
I’ve
ever encountered who can sing of lettuces, broccoli, onions and
‘the
hairy trumpets of leeks’. She has learnt what she calls
‘the glorious
speech of the earth’.
Don’t be put off; do buy this book.
Back to top
The Seductive Microcosm
Alison Croggon: The Blue Gate
Jennifer Maiden
Overland,
No. 150, Autumn 1998
Another cage - this time of subject matter - is suggested to me by
Alison Croggon’s
The
Blue Gate.
I had heard very well of this writer and was indeed avidly impressed by
her clear, deliberate vocabulary and intense expertise in spacing and
timing - as in ‘Song’, which begins
‘There is a flower / made of
eyelids / there is a moon / which scythes the ripples / of a black
river / and then nothing’. There is a circularity in her
themes,
however - a recurrence of elemental things, broken loves, legends,
children, birdsong - as if all were brilliantly frozen in a lyricism
which makes me wish the blue gate would open more often. There is a
wilfulness in such perfection and it will become quite admirably the
wilfulness of wider, wilder art.
Back to top
The Blue Gate
Allison Croggon
Jason Sweeney (poet)
Sidewalk,
No. 1, 1998
Like a list I try to order some kind of response. At random, in order
of appearance...
Ultrasound:
the unborn (yet) unshaped ultrasound techno-screen star, anticipation
of a bluegreen figure.
Bird:
a
skeleton withholding it’s memory.
Aria:
a fear of love, the interminable truth of closure, nothing ever lasts,
we might as well sing operas, this libretto over dinner.
Pause:
there’s horror out there, a
million untold stories, bleak moments, a collection of beautiful
atrocities.
Elegy for
Children:
shaped into things (out of the ultrasound, into sight, flesh), signs of
things, being things, bodies born out of innocence, still shine in your
head.
Nights:
in flat
darkness
there are, or seem to be, no words, so much fear and the accent of
pain. A hundred thoughts, grand scale, manifested in half-sleep and a
poem is written.
Fugue:
poetry, I think, is about articulating the intangible. Or is that the
reviewing of it?
The
Elwood Organic
Fruit and Vegetable Shop: ah, the language of food, to see
and
eat, something tangible and of flesh.
Angels:
Croggon, she’s opening the sky, spilling hymns, saviours in
lines of
words, silent on the page, new children are angels, another elegy,
boosted spirits.
Lines
on Human Grace:
remembering sex and body and sweat and the ringing in your ears, what
can never be a total picture but snapshots of an erotic moment, bodies
as plates to feed off, consumption, politely.
Shark: my friend is
made nauseous
by
the sight of sharks, so there are prayers and poems, psalms even, a
litany loaded with oceans of death, regret, possibly life.
Sonnets: flesh,
anger, loss
transferred - what of his (now absent) body? his cock? what’s
his?
what’s yours?
Limbo:
cycles
like words, a body remembers pain then fears it, remembers words then
loses them, recites poetry to a crowd, gives life to it.
Fairytale: breaking
into a
dollhouse, in an ugly city of gilt-edged mirrors, all cracking, we find
fantasy and strange reality collide [here].
Notes: footnotes
from a broken
heart, burnt tongues of desire, scolded in fact, there’s
bleeding and
blood-letting. Letting the words seep through. Something to hold.
Croggon gives the reader a remarkable glimpse into horror and purity.
The shape of words to come.
Back to top
Layered Lip after Lip
The
Blue Gate
Debbie Comerford
Coppertales, A Journal
of Rural Arts,
No. 5, 1998 (pgs 117-118)
[Text not yet available]
Back to top
Alison
Croggon, The Blue Gate
Jack Bedson
New England Review,
No. 7,
Summer 1997-1998
Black Pepper press in North Fitzroy is among the current crop of small
non-commercial publishers putting out attractive paperbacks of new
Australian poetry with the assistance of the Australia Council. In
these two 1997 titles by Alison Croggon and
Hugh
Tolhurst [
Filth
and Other Poems], Black Pepper shows us it can appeal to very
different palates…
Alison Croggon is a writer not shy of a challenge. Besides poetry
published in Australia and overseas, her biographical note lists an
output including journalism, plays, libretti, translations, editing and
criticism.
The title of this, Croggon’s second book of poems,
The Blue Gate, is
part tease, part
clue, and partly an opening into secret gardens of spiritual and
imaginative possibilities. And yes - childhood and the past.
Croggon’s
impulse is to go through the material world to inscapes of secrecy and
darkness, and to open it up to a sense of higher nature.
The book is riddled with gnostic and Manichean symbolism.
Don’t bother
looking up your Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion - I’ve
got mine
open. Gnosticism was a sect of the early Christian church that was into
dualisms between good and evil, light and dark. Materialism is evil and
the spiritual world is the realm of goodness. There are angels
everywhere, sort of gremlins who emanate from God, but help spread
darkness. There’s a Great Mother who gives birth to the
angels. There’s
a Primal Man who comes to make war on darkness, is partly vanquished
but sets himself free. Now, the Gnostic elect could get out of the shit
and lift themselves up towards God through appropriate knowledge and
ascetic separation from the lower world. The union of the Great Mother
and the Primal Man signals salvation. One of the bits I like about
Manicheanism is that even at the inanimate level (rocks and stuff)
there is light to be released from darkness - it streams towards the
higher regions by a ‘Pillar of Glory’.
I’m only going on about all this
because it’s all there in
The Blue
Gate, (I’ll let you wonder what Alison gets up
to on a Saturday
night). There’s angels, wings, darkness, heaven, clouds,
dreams, night,
birth, and people and things opening up to light and revelation
You
open the blue gate
in the wall of stone
...into the distant
summer.
‘Divinations VIII’
this book of changes, dissolvings, transformations, fluidity between
inside and out, between people and nature. Many of the poems resolve
themselves in a final movement towards light, nature, sublimation, or
sensual epiphany, towards final images of air, breath, wind, ocean,
love, and sun.
Gnostic material is not the point of Croggon’s poetry, it is
simply one
strand, one starting point, in her creative mill. Other starting points
are the poetic tradition and musical forms - the ways that art works,
what it can articulate and what it fails to articulate, the
inexpressible, white space and silences, unfaithful translations
...your
crumbling words, unable to hold even one drop of light.
(‘Ars Poetica’)
Part of Croggon’s experiment is in line with the modern
effort to get
maximum expression and referentiality with few words - words as
ciphers, cuneiforms,
red
fist, nose, coney, eye,
moody orchid,
(‘Cuneiforms’)
Even in the titles she gives her poems, three-quarters of them are one
word only: ‘Bird’, ‘Aria’,
‘Pause’, ‘Nights’,
‘Fugue’, ‘Angels’,
‘Lunar’, ‘Sonnets’,
‘Limbo’, ‘Elysium’,
‘Riddle’, ‘Sonata’. These are
blue gates, opening into a world rich with possibilities. Never a
reductionist, Croggon believes in flowering open.
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A Dense, Word-Haunted Forest
Alison Croggon, The Blue
Gate
Martin Langford
Ulitarra,
No. 12, 1997
The ‘blue gate’ in the title of Alison
Croggon’s second book of poems
is an entrance to the ecstatic and the marvellous, and much of this
book is an attempt to find words for the related ecstatic worlds of
love and art. Perhaps its central tension is that paradise both must
and cannot exist: a duality stalked and paralleled by the not unrelated
paradox that art both attempts to capture some sense of ecstasy
(‘crumbling words, unable / to hold even one drop of
water’: ‘Ars
Poetica’) yet also contributes to the vision of paradise in
the first
place. It is not surprising that the collection is prefaced by a quote
from Rilke.
At its best, some excellent poetry is produced by these tensions.
Croggon’s craftsmanship is sufficient to enable her to say
what she
really wants to say, and the poems are impressive for their honesty.
Look at the wonderful balancing act in the word
‘loosens’, for example:
In
the simple gardens
the orchards of hair and
sweat
mesmeric with dapple and
beehum
where birdbreath tunes
its delicacies
and the skeined senses
tumble out
their embroideries
the eyed wing, the
amphibian tongue,
the feathered hand
stone loosens its speech
‘Divinations I’
While this is a book displaying a great deal of skill and courage, I do
have some reservations. To some extent these question marks are a
by-product of the unfortunate fact that every style has some
shortcomings; that you cannot build strengths in any area without also
making sacrifices in others. In most of these poems, the emotional
intensity is pitched fairly high. It often feels as if the focus is on
the emotion, that the poem’s primary function is as a vehicle
for the
retrieval of feeling. That need not be a problem: the more intense
voices are badly under-represented in Australian poetry. But it does
create a curious effect when thinking about these poems afterwards: the
power of the emotion can tend to evaporate in a manner analogous to the
way the memory of emotions - such overwhelming forces - simply vanish
in real life. A further, more significant point is that in
Croggon’s
poetry, a focus on intensity accompanies a de-emphasis on the
particularities of time and place - perhaps the momentum of emotional
imperatives cannot afford that slower paced attention to the detailed
and specific.
Croggon’s language (via Rilke, and Americans such as Merwin?)
is in
some ways a modern version of a grand style. It insists on the nobility
of intensity without being foolish enough to ask why such urgency
should be noble. When, however, the attention wavers or the pitch
drops, it can become a type of grandspeak, overly reliant on the strong
beat or the extra breath, and on words such as
‘dark’ or ‘burn’. At its
best, however - and Croggon’s attention does not waver too
often -
there is some terrific verse. The following ‘Psalms out of
Sickness’
are perhaps indicative of her poise and control:
once
I thought
answers would grow
cleanly
out of the soil of my
life:
I would pluck them - aha!
inhaling serenity
o my love you are there
instead
with your empty hand
curving to the shape of
my cheek
This verse is brave and well-crafted. Just occasionally, I could wish
it were a little more particular.
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The Blue Gate
Helen Harton
Imago, Vol.
9, No. 3, Summer
1997
Alison Croggon’s poetic expression is rather more enigmatic,
tending at
times to the esoteric, but the images it conjures up have an appeal all
their own.
midnight
rolls like hunger
into the still eye of an
absolute dawn
all the possible birds
arrive
and fly through your sky
like music
‘Elysium’
Her collection begins with a ‘mother to child’ poem
and continues with
several that are a celebration of life. Many of the poems contain
metaphors that relate back to the love of a mother for her child, an
emotion that Croggon puts above all else, although this wonder in life
and its emergence is extended also to other forms, such as birds, or a
tree bursting into bud.
Soon, however, the mood changes - there are many emotional pitfalls,
and the necessity of getting on with life and of somehow transcending
those pitfalls is always in the background. Amongst the one- to
two-line life fragments presented in the poem
‘Pause’ is one which
concludes that ‘A lie becomes a truth and then a
history’, striking a
note of wariness in any present day outlook. Throughout the collection,
there are recurrent metaphors referring to water (or rain), sunshine,
shadows, trees and blossom, and children. They have a cohesive effect
on the whole.
The title,
The Blue Gate,
comes from one of the poems in a series entitled
‘Divinations’; it is a
symbolic gate in a ‘wall of stone’ through which we
must pass. On the
other side, in these poems, there is a feeling of being in a world
without end, without resolution, albeit with much love; and in the way
of dreams, it gets you in.
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Silence and Solitude
Andrew Sant
Australian Book Review,
No. 195, October 1997
Two presences in Alison Croggon’s poetry in
The Blue Gate are
Walt Whitman and
Rainer Maria Rilke. Whitman, the American, in his preface to
Leaves of Grass,
writes of the poet
responding to his country’s spirit, of being
‘commensurate with a
people’. If Whitman endeavours to speak from the middle of
life and
culture in nineteenth century America, the German poet, Rilke, in his
famous
Duino Elegies,
speaks
of the need to abandon such a position to quest for something much
deeper though elusive in ourselves. These views suggest something of
the polarities in Croggon’s work.
Rilke, at his most complex, is a difficult poet. Indeed, he implied
that the way to enjoy his
Elegies
is not through elucidation but rather through the reader’s
abandonment
to them. In any case, poetry is diminished by elucidation if dogged, as
many a bored classroom student knows having been denied the immediate
experience of it. Perhaps this is why Whitman was for so long
under-appreciated: a poet so fond of lists of things and events
delivered with great cumulative effect makes pedagogical exegesis
redundant. The trick is just to go with it.
I suspect Croggon feels much the same about appreciation of her poetry.
Often shifting and elusive, her poems can conjure the
‘strangeness of
dreams’ - a quality she mentions in her poem to Rilke. There
is also an
epigraph to the book as a whole in German from Rilke which asks that we
liberate ourselves from things loved so that we can, in effect, become
more ourselves. Readers would therefore be right not to expect many
familiar signposts in Croggon’s poetry; there are few proper
nouns and
things that are named are often in the service of inner experience. So
in the main this is not ‘social’ poetry as much
Australian poetry is,
in a relatively congenial and outgoing way.
‘Silence’ and ‘solitude’
are key words though the poetry is neither quiet nor retiring.
This might make the sensuousness and abundance portrayed in
‘The Elwood
Organic Fruit and Vegetable Shop’ seem at odds with the
general drift
of the book. Here there is a wonderfully celebratory Whitmanesque list
of produce - ‘the glorious speech of the earth!’
Croggon is at the
centre of ‘the civil business of buying and
selling’ where mangoes are
‘soft yellow thighs’ and orchids are
‘strange and beautiful as clitoral
kisses’. However in a neighbouring poem, ‘Ode to
Walt Whitman’, the
‘gentle imperfect generous man’ is addressed as a
companion in a widely
viewed but diminished world where ‘cities mourn their dead no
longer’.
This poem proceeds in Whitmanesque style, a homage, until it leads to a
personal declaration:
...truly
what is my faith
except a stubborn voice
casting out its shining
length to
where I walk alone
sick and afraid and
unable to accept
defeat
singing as I was born to
Croggon’s inherited strategies here serve her own ends neatly.
But this is not a bleak book. The ‘stubborn voice’
is restless,
impatient, exploratory - attuned to bedrock reality. Poems are often
carried forward by sheer rhythmical energy and, if the nature of the
anguish that often informs them can be hard to pin down, it’s
because
anguish is seen as a price of being alive when emotions are strong.
Courage (in ‘Bird’) and fortitude (in
‘Limbo’) overcome the odds, no
more so than in the fine opening poem to Croggon’s son, which
is one of
several memorable poems where the abiding concern is with motherhood.
In ‘Ultrasound’ there’s hope the child
will ‘burst the sorrow of your
swelling mother’. Elsewhere ‘savage
promise’ leads to loss. When
Croggon’s poems depict moments of consolation they are
particularly
moving:
in
the house of my soul
the bed is smooth and
dark, its
pungent shadows
breathe in the empty
room we still
inhabit
and silently the book
opens its voices
in the late air, where
hands have been
waking to tasks, to the
patient
business of living.
All is quiet now, the
light is gentle
and you,
voice that I love, o you
are coming
home.
‘Sonata’
Like Rilke, Croggon would choose to summon angels, whether, in her
poetry, they embody belief in or the impossibility of fulfilment,
I’m
not sure. Unlike Rilke she has an enduring regard for relationships
while he tended to see them as a distraction. Her poems about
relationships are among her best - highly-charged, erotic. Then a
clever surprise in a book where experience is so often depicted as
being raw and relentless, her ‘Sonnets’ offer a
formal elegance that
dignifies pleasure and pain. A surprise, not only within the context of
this book, but also because these days the sonnet is so often put to
more demotic uses.
John Leonard, quoted on the cover, is right to praise
Croggon’s craft.
She can slip in and out of styles as readily as an amphibian slips from
land to water. It’s part of her achievement that this can
seem as much
facilitatory as a matter of flourish; though sometimes, as in
‘Bearing’, she cranks up the volume too much and
the poetry becomes
overwrought. I was also concerned about her readiness to make such
prosaic statements as ‘The slow beat of living continues,
intolerably’.
This is not borne put by the overall dexterity and richness of
Croggon’s poetry, its willingness to be formal or fragmentary
with
equal flair - its distinction not diminished by the company of the two
great poets it honours.
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Top Shelf
Editor’s Choice
The
Blue Gate by Alison Croggon
Larry Schwartz
The Sunday Age,
17 August 1997
Journalist and writer Croggon has been hailed as among the best of a
younger generation of Australian poets since publication of her
award-winning first book of poems six years ago.
The new collection comes with critical plaudits on the back cover from
the likes of Les Murray (‘an important shift in literary
polarities’),
John Leonard (‘dense, intense and beautifully
crafted’) and Geoff Page
(‘a constant feeling of lyrical sensuality’).
She has the flair to write of experience such as love or childbirth in
a way that has resonance for others. ‘Ode to Walt
Whitman’ might make
you think of Ginsberg’s imagined encounter with the bard in a
California supermarket; a line such as ‘stone loosens its
speech,’ in
‘Divinations’ is reminiscent of another by W.C.
Williams.
But her voice is very much her own, finding an order in the world about
her.
‘Poetry remembers/ everything that exhaustion / strews across
a
wasteland’, she writes in ‘Fugue’. In
another (‘Ars Poetica’), of ‘a
possible music’ that ‘lifts through the panic of
decay’.
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Connections & Contrasts
The
Blue Gate
Michelle Mee (poet)
Australian
Women’s Book Review,
Vol. 9, No. 2-3, Spring 1997
As the publishing industry gradually prints more Australian women
poets, the marvellously diverse nature of women’s voices is
heard and
can be celebrated. The four collections [Ludwika Amber,
Our Territory,
Emma
Lew,
The Wild
Reply, Sarah Day,
Quickening],
discussed in the following, indicate something of the fecundity,
intensity, method and power of work currently being produced by
Australian women writers. Sometimes there are connections, other times
contrasts...
Reading Alison Croggon’s
The
Blue
Gate is a joyful, painful, intense experience. It is
written
with something more substantial than ink, perhaps clotted blood, such
is the bright colour and shock of the poems.
Other times the sensual explorations give pleasure. There is an
exquisite, squirming-with-life poem for shoppers - ‘The
Elwood Organic
Fruit and Vegetable Shop’. There are erotic poems, writing of
tracery
on skin, giving frisson to the mind. A pleasure to be reading them, as
the words are printed on flesh, on bone, on brain. Yet good feeling is
gutted in poems about separation, loss, feelings of incompleteness.
There arc many bruises in this collection. The voice is strong and
insists on stating its pain.
Sometimes I felt, reading this volume, that I had fallen into a Venus
fly-trap and was drowning in the poet’s sensitivities,
acuteness. It
was an acid bath, and bones remain, memories of intensity and colour.
Resonate.
The most intense birth poem I’ve read is contained in this
collection.
‘Nights’ shows us an hallucinatory evening of
childbirth where a
child’s ‘single cry is the axis’. And
later child-rearing, in ‘Ode to
Walt Whitman’, is gritty, frustrating and occasionally,
humorous.
The Blue Gate
is a profoundly
felt collection. It is backgrounded by Croggon’s novel
Navigatio,
a work that rests sometimes closer to poetry than prose.
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