"Cronin's remaking, re-envisaging, re-creation of Cesar Vallejo's astonishing masterpiece Trilce enables a re-imagining of many of Vallejo's lifelong obsessions: childhood, the family unit, poverty, injustice and the anarchic joy of language. Just as in Vallejo there is an intimate self-exposure taking place alongside and within the disruption of language. The social structures that marginalise people and their experiences are seen as embodied in the language structures and conventions rigidified in traditional poetic and prosaic structures. Cronin, just like Vallejo, seeks to break both open. All the levels of life-the banal, the most elevated, the erotic, the pragmatic- collapse into each other. A joyous sense of multiple voices liberates the poetic from tired patterns: "All these things we use for walls/ when the walls fall down!" (XVIII). Much of Cronin's play with Vallejo's 1922 experimental sequence originates in the gender difference between herself and Vallejo and the humour to be found in male-centred assumptions. A Ticket to Trilce provides admission to a private female stocktake of an early 20th Century classic in a contemporary Australian setting. A lover of Vallejo herself, Cronin provides us with a passport to another version of his great vision." -Peter Boyle

"This is poetry that goes direct to that other place and inhabits it. in possession of loss has a clear sparseness, almost a minimalism, that is also highly complex. Read as a single book-length poem, it thinks our world without telling openly. As in Inger Christensen's Alphabet, everything hangs together and speaks the whole though one can't exactly say how. Like Celan and Rilke before her, Cronin is a risk-taker: she can say 'love', 'loss', 'death', 'the heart', without tying the words to recognizable stories or hiding behind the game of avoiding meaning. This is a poetry that shoulders the big questions. Compared to so much that is written in the English-speaking world, Cronin's poetry IS so different and so itself." - Peter Boyle

Subtitled 'The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli' - a neglected 20th century poet much influenced by Celan and Vallejo - this collection represents the merging of two fine Australian poets into the consciousness of an other. Or An Other. Both authors worked on each individual text, and thus it is a true joint effort, not simply a kind of book-length renga. A remarkable departure for two of the finest poets from Australia's current middle generation.

M.T.C. Cronin's last Shearsman collection 1-100, was awarded two major literary prizes in her native Australia and also brought her significant attention both in the UK and the USA. Her new collection is in fact four small books in one, four separate 'notebooks', of which the Notebook of Signs is the first, and is followed by the Notebooks of Shapes, Nerves and Sand. Ms Cronin often works in longer forms - although equally adept at the short lyric - and these four sequences demonstate her mastery in this area.

is Australian poet MTC Cronin's tenth book and her second British collection. A compositional tour de force, the sequence consists of one hundred poems, the line-count arcing from a single line in poem 1 to fifty lines in poem 50, and thence back down to a single line in poem 100. Like many forms, self-imposed or otherwise, Ms Cronin uses this apparently restrictive structure to support a wonderfully original unfolding of verse. Ms Cronin's work has been attracting enormous interest in both Britain and North America, and this volume will reinforce her burgeoning reputation.