In striving to describe the overall effect of M.T.C. Cronin’s bravura performance in <More or Less Than> 1-100, it is difficult to trump Peter Porter’s ‘precipitously oracular’, quoted on the back cover. There is indeed a sense in which the poetry offers, as is the habit of oracular utterance, a distinctly slippery slope of meaning to be negotiated in following its 100 numbered poems as they increase in numerical sequence from an initial single line to fifty and then, in mirror reversal, decrease to the single line of poem 100. Not that there is anything slippery about Cronin’s technical control in this example of an exuberantly free verse poet embracing the otherness of formal, even arbitrary, patterning. She is sufficiently confident that, in a work with so categorical a design of beginning and ending, she can write mockingly: