Fish Stories

Mary Cresswell's poetry is an adventure playground where experiments in form and ingenious wordplay are part of the game. But this game is serious. Anemometers are whirling; grey-green children are howling on the shoreline. Ignore her at your peril. She'll make you smile and she'll make you think."" - Janis Freegard, Wellington poet and author, The Glass Rooster and The Escapades of Linnaeus

""Natural disaster looms throughout Mary Cresswell's Fish Stories: avalanche, flood, storm, quake. Sometimes her slant-rhymed poems mimic an environment gone haywire, its patterns fragmenting. The intense formality of this collection, however – populated not only by wild variations on the ghazal but by glosas, syllabics, a cento, and a broken sonnet or two – more often suggest the connective forces still holding the world together, for a while. The waves may ‘quarrel up the rocks', as she puts it in 'Diaspora', but we birds still 'stand in rows and lean against each other'."" - Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia