In Possession of Loss

"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