The Australian Book Review described Alison Croggon as “one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.” Her poetry has been widely published in journals both in Australia and overseas, and is included in many major Australian anthologies, most recently in Paul Kelly’s Love is Stronger than Death. and the German anthology Natur! edited by John Burnside. Titles include: Theatre (Salt Publishing 2008), Ash (Cusp Books, Los Angeles 2007); November Burning (Vagabond Press Rare Objects Series, Sydney, 2004); Mnemosyne, (Wild Honey Press, Ireland, 2001); The Common Flesh: New and Selected Poems (Arc Publications, UK, 2003) and Attempts at Being, (Salt Publishing, UK, 2002). Her poetry books have been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, and have won the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore prizes.
Her most recent collection is New and Selected Poems 1991-2017, which includes poems from all her collections as well as new and unpublished work. More details of her poetry are available in her full biography.
Photo: Alison Croggon reading at Poetry International, Royal Festival Hall, London
new and selected poems
1991-2017
Raw, passionate and dazzling, Alison Croggon’s poetry confronts a world fractured by different kinds of violence – patriarchal, colonial, sexual and emotional – and finds there a difficult beauty. New and Selected Poems 1991-2017 brings together works from all nine of her published collections, new poems and previously unpublished work. It demonstrates the full range of her art: formally inventive, intellectually curious and stylistically assured.
“[Croggon’s] lyric ‘I’ is not the often vapid, dull but clever ‘I’ or lack of it that often prevails in some curiously passive male poetry…She is profoundly liberated from the oppressive politics of the narrow self.” – Patricia McCarthy, Agenda
“Alison Croggon’s poetry is distinguished by passion, intelligence and intense moral honesty.” – George Szirtes
Cover image: Zoe Croggon. Eros and Thanatos 2016
poetry in translation
Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Alison Croggon
Shortlisted for the NSW Premiers Awards Translation Prize 2023
Alison Croggon’s revelatory new translation captures the energies of Rilke’s poems with an urgent, acute clarity. ‘The turbulent currents that make the Elegies so enthralling are generated by the dynamic contradictions of a mind acutely conscious of its own movements,’ she writes in her afterword. ‘The poems are not “about” life: rather, they are a startling mimesis of its instability and transience.’
Alison Croggon’s transformative and impassioned translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies attempts the extraordinary… Signature, regret, pain, trauma, wonder, euphoria, wonder, rapture and an immersion in the senses are all contained in the crispness and experiential sensibility that guides her relationship with the original poems. Croggon lives in the wild beauty of these Elegies and makes them glow in translation… This is an incendiary work. — John Kinsella
‘Alison Croggon is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.’
Australian Book Review
‘Croggon’s poems offer something intense, difficult and fragile, but simultaneously intimate and hugely rewarding in the reading.’
Cordite Poetry Review
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the major modernist poets in the German language, notable for the lyric intensity of his work. He considered the Duino Elegies – a cycle of ten poems written in inspirational bursts between 1912 and 1922 – to be his major achievement.
Printed en face with the German text and with an afterword and notes by the translator. Preface by John Kinsella.
ISBN: 9780648874430
Paperback, 106 pages
Newport Street Books
Distribution: Ingram Content
Bookshop inquiries: admin@alisoncroggon.com.
The common flesh
The Common Flesh is Alison Croggon’s third full-length collection of poetry. It is a powerful and compelling work in which the often very personal subject-matter of the poems – the human body, states of mind, emotional turmoil – is expressed, as the poet says, to “create a quality of tension between raw emotional immediacy and a formal poetic aesthetic that has some affinities with Brecht’s theory of estrangement”. With their structural delicacy, emotional impact and archetypal resonances, these poems will long remain with the reader.
“Often shifting and allusive, her poems can convey the ‘strangeness of dream’… She can slip in and out of styles as readily as an amphibian slips from land to water.” – Australian Book Review
“Alison Croggon… is one of the most assured of a new generation of Australian poets.” – A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry
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