Attempts at Being

by Croggon, Alison

• ISBN13: 9781876857424
• ISBN10: 1876857420
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-03-01
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

"Often shifting and elusive, her poems can convey the 'strangeness of dream' . 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 the price of being alive . She can slip in and out of styles as readily as an amphibian slips from land to water." Australian Book Review "This is a poetry of changes, dissolvings, transformations, fluidity between inside and out, between people and nature . Other starting points are the poetic tradition and musical forms - the ways that art works, what it can articulate and fail to articulate, the inexpressible, white space and silences, unfaithful translations." New England Review "Alison Croggon is one of the most assured of a new generation of Australian poets." A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry

Table of Contents

Part One	1	(12)
Child's play	3	(2)
Attempts at being	5	(2)
They do not arrive in time	7	(1)
Elegy	8	(1)
Hands	9	(2)
Illness	11	(1)
Medea	12	(1)
The Breach	13	(8)
Part Three	21	(10)
Elegy II	23	(2)
Weather	25	(1)
Breath steams across chilled fields	26	(1)
Silence broke my mouth	27	(1)
The wind	28	(1)
Songs of grass	29	(2)
Part Four	31	(30)
A digression	33	(1)
Monologues for an apocalypse	34	(15)
On lyric	49	(12)
Part Five	61	(6)
Leaves	63	(2)
Saint	65	(1)
This window	66	(1)
Lenz	67	(40)
Part Seven	107	(12)
Lamps	109	(1)
Language	110	(1)
Where are the dark woods?	111	(1)
Mnemosyne	112	(5)
Solo	117	(2)
The Famine	119	(16)
Part Nine	135	(16)
Amplitudes	137	(14)
Arthur	151	(10)
Part Eleven	161
Phrases	163
Suttee	164
Owl songs	165

Excerpts

Saint You became a dark earth on the back of a real sun, which blazed in credulous eyes. When you shot the lamb, its bleat festered like a splinter. At 3am the lights throbbed like veins on dark men who staggered out of clubs smelling of starvation. You knew them all, the shout, the fist, the eyes like stale urine. You went inside. A woman lay bound and gagged on a table. You took out your wounds and laid them beside her. She kept breathing, staring straight ahead. At last you remembered the sun, its whiteness, the clarity of steel. You left her there, familiar at last, and your hands smelt of sweet acid. It was dawn again.