Attempts at Being - Salt Modern Poets (Paperback)

Often shifting and allusive, her poems can convey the `strangeness of dream'.... The `stubborn voice' is restless, impatient, exploratory - attuned to bedrock reality. Poems are often carried forward by sheer rhythmical energy and, if the nature of the anguish that often informs them can be hard to pin down, it's because anguish is seen as the price of being alive.... She can slip in and out of styles as readily as an amphibian slips from land to water.

This is a poetry of changes, dissolvings, transformations, fluidity between inside and out, between people and nature.... Other starting points are the poetic tradition and musical forms - the ways that art works, what it can articulate and fail to articulate, the inexpressible, white space and silences, unfaithful translations.

Alison Croggon ... is one of the most assured of a new generation of Australian poets.