Attempts at Being

by Alison Croggon

Published 1 January 2002

Often shifting and allusive, Croggon's poems can convey the `strangeness of dream'.... The `stubborn voice' is restless, impatient, exploratory - attuned to bedrock reality. Her 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.


Theatre

by Alison Croggon

Published 8 September 2008
The Gift leaning into a reflection that my eyes do not register as my belly dissolves as I vanish into the space your eyes devour. I have no place to be either woken or alone. I have no name and my lips are colder than imagining when I sleep on the ice of dreams. It is a vapour of fear that rises. It is a cold anaesthetic fume rising like a goddess. Her chilly feathers glancing on my skin like kisses. I have forgotten or gestures flinching between one shadow and another. I am often afraid.