More or Less Than By MTC Cronin, Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2004, 136 pages, paperback, £9.95. Reviewed by Carolyn van Langenberg in the April 2005 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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On the morning I had set aside to read <More Or Less Than> 1-100 I was listening to Radio National's Law Report in which Julie Clarke, lecturer in law at Deakin University, argued for the legalisation of torture. Beatings conducted according to the ordinances after the Act with a medical practitioner present, so Clarke believes if my ears did not deceive me, would not damage health, mental or physical. Her assertion lashed 'like the leashes which bind answers to their questions' ('32' p 38).
What music then to read 'not simply the stream but they who thought of following' ('1' p7), the opening words of <<More Or Less Than> 1-100.
Who is following? Clarke? Or myself? Or the two of us in tandem? What are we following? Where will the stream flow? Is the reader asked to stay on the bank of the stream to observe thought unfolding? Are we invited into the stream to feel thought hurtling, sinking, tumbling?
Tumbling is the sensation that carried me through the lyrical pulse of the cycle, from 1 to 100: not just along the way, vines finding light and its myth,
as myth, invisible, unplants one life for another,
but the unrecognizable fruit they will test with their teeth
for the answer to the tongue's question
('4', p 10) And how, in this most wonderful poem, the tongue 'caresses and ruins'.
Cronin has structured her cycle of poems with precision, poem '1' being one line, poem '4' four lines, continuing in like manner until poem '50', which is 50 lines in length. Then the cycle folds round, poem '51' being 50 lines and so forth, until the last, poem '100', 'ice follows water follows' (p 136), like the first. One line is the fluvial signifier that energy in both the natural world and the world of human thought is disorderly as it brings order to chaos.
Water is the source of life. With life comes activity -- dreams, myths, history, law and lore. Civilisation is the product of thought. <More Or Less Than> 1-100 reminds the ubiquitous they how finite is mortality. Death excludes no one.
Within the restraint of the self-imposed structure, interlocutory voices flow and eddy and rush, compelling the followers onward. The voices sink and spill in the first fifty poems where narrator and audience are judge and jury, the mix of socio-political observation with surreal drama, subjects (of discussion and in the third person plural) evoked, emoted and dropped away. Nevertheless, 'they who thought of following' are never free of knowing that, whether spoken or written, words are 'dead and fast like stones', that stones are weights that fall and crush, like the vocabulary that justifies inaction and the worst of actions.
From poem '51', the cycle diverges unexpectedly and precariously into the first and second person, creating an intimate conversation pressing on the heart. The heart is as central to human discourse as are words so fixed with legal weight that they cannot escape the force of gravity.
Inscribed is the personal with passionate affect. Intimacy is visceral, and yet it is directed away from the personal to the universal. The personal you is a lover or the reader. You is self-referenced, the poet or lawyer evaluating the ambiguity that style has embedded in content. You is the poem itself, that ancient form of oracle 'but you kept changing your shape, any beast would do' ('92' p 128) addressed by the poet wherever wars and shopping centres and time and space flow with light and water, kisses and grief. cut the world in half with the knife
inserted right between my feet; open my hand
and find the frozen earth; plant the apple
seeds of my fingertips inside the inner walls
of my chest and, delicate, thin, watch
the new world grow from there, pulsing like
the folded-back lips of a pap-hawk
suckling at the breast of the spider, ant,
bones of the shaking chest of the cosmos;
tell only the truth and grieve only for such
cause as that, think, burning, swearing
('90' p 126) By refusing to elide the truth tucked inside the second person singular you, Cronin demands the responsibility of, not the self-indulgence of, inclusion. From poem '67' onwards, she cuts to the quick, using the first person plural, the personal pronoun we. we are all the same
we are not magical
we are not strong
we think we are magical
we think we are strong
why are you poor?
('67' p 103) There are no innocent bystanders in this riverrunning poetics.
Perhaps lecturer in law Julie Clarke has forgotten that 'all is invisible in this morning that has forgotten the night' ('8' p 14), those dark hours when tongue, heart, entrails, truth and justice are beyond the bureaucratic process that is mindlessness itself. The clerks at Auschwitz, diligent in their occupation, forgot that the numerals they neatly inked in columns referred to human beings. the word they had put in their own place and
finally, when they had forgotten the present
they solved death, immortal,
they developed the art of accident
('50' p 71) MTC Cronin, herself a trained lawyer, has not forgotten the limitations of law and lore.
And so the cycle is 'the taste of a whispered world' ('98' p 134), a conjoining of the ancient Sumerian hymn Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth with John Milton's Paradise Lost and Samuel Beckett's Company. <More Or Less Than> 1-100, with swift and weightless ease, endorses the inescapable theme of our common humanity post-September 11, 2001. To quote Peter Porter from the back cover '... an extraordinary vision overall'. Citation - Carolyn van Langenberg. 'Review: More or Less Than by MTC Cronin' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), April 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].
Back Cover Blurb - More or Less Than is Australian poet MTC Cronin's tenth book and her second British publication. A compositional tour de force, the poem consists of 100 parts, the line-count arcing from one line in part 1 to fifty lines in part 50, and thence back down to one in part 100 with parts of equal line-counts making mirroring pairs. Like many forms, self-imposed or otherwise, Ms Cronin uses this apparently restrictive structure to support a wonderfully original unfolding of verse.
\'Poets have always enjoyed close relations with oracles, and oracles are fond of dazzling us with numbers. MTC Cronin's new collection of poetry counts the mystery of life, love and literature up to 50 by addition of lines, and then proceeds to the full 100 by subtracting them. Throughout the verse is precipitously oracular - filled with strangeness and yet abidingly concerned with everyday experience. It is indeed A Book of the Dead and a Journal of the Living. This amounts to a new departure by one of Australia's most admired younger poets - an extraordinary vision overall.' - Peter Porter
'More or Less Than is a wonderment. A sustained, brilliant, evocative sequence, the book has the organic movement of a breath exhaling into the world, moving from within the most private of the selves to the most ubiquitous 'they', from the sensual world to the phantom touch of dreams, from the losses of war to the losses of the mind. Shifting between scales and dictions, from the drift of stars to the drift of cells, from surrealistic image to legal language, the poem is both impelled forward, as if entirely necessary, and yet full of rhythmic alternations, ripening at times as if it were the fruit it spoke of, dividing on the edge of sharpness, dminishing into ice and water. Startling verbal play turns to profound depths of thought, an honesty without any display, so embodied that the lyric seems to touch upon the pulse of human sensibility.' - Rebecca Seiferle
'In beautiful and surprising poetry MTC Cronin sets about her project: not entirely to make sense but not to evade sense either, to speak simultaneously of levels of being as diverse as the physical body, the complexities of relationships, the socio-political world and the wordless solitude of the self before death. Cronin engages us with a kind of intimate truth-talking that provokes wonderment and contemplation.' - Peter Boyle
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