Poetry collection

Like M.T.C. Cronin’s earlier collections, beautiful, unfinished is characterised by a mixture of mystical awe and formal restraint. The collection is subtitled PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM’. As this suggests, it consists of a parable of sorts in verse, a sequence of songs, a set of cantos ‘minus melody’, and some poems. But in Cronin’s hands, these various forms seem based upon haiku. She writes sparely in short-lined stanzas, and she undercuts her own rhythms until it seems as if almost every poem might end in an ellipsis.

Alex Skovron has always been a clever poet, sometimes playfully so, more often seriously so. Skovron, who was born in Poland in 1948 and came to Australia, via Israel, in 1958, is steeped in the European intellectual tradition, though he wears his erudition lightly. Like almost everyone else, Skovron is troubled by the twentieth century: it seems to hang over the horizon of this book. He is also concerned about the nineteenth. As he says in ‘The Centuries’: ‘It is necessary to remind oneself / that the nineteenth century has never really left us: / it has been here all along, biding its time.’

Anthony Lawrence’s latest collection of poetry, Skinned by Light: Poems 1989–2002, a revision of his New and Selected (1998), is a much tighter work than its predecessor – 121 as against 335 pages. While some may wonder why UQP has published another ‘Selected’ from Lawrence in the space of four years, the publication of his novel, In the Half Light (2000), justifies introducing Lawrence’s poetry to a wider readership.