Older,+tougher+Cronin,+master+of+dialectics,+Sunday+Independent

Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, April 23, 2006 //Edition 1//
=Older, tougher Cronin has come of age as a master of dialectics=

Author: Jeremy Cronin Publisher: Little Price: R96**
 * More Than A casual Contact

In his 1997 collection Even the Dead Cronin proffered three reasons for writing "a mixed, umrabulo, round-the-corner" poetry: namely, "I live in a country with eleven different languages, / Mass illiteracy, and a shaky memory".

That earlier collection was very much a study on transition, on the potential and constraints of the new South Africa, imaged, for example, in the sight of a man who escaped a necklacing, running from his executioners, "Into our rainbow nation, in desperation, one shoe on, one shoe off". Nine years on, Cronin's preoccupations and his chosen poetic register remain much the same, though now distilled to a tougher consistency.

The mixed, umrabulo, round-the-corner stratagem is still in play—nowhere more so than in A poem for Basil Mannenberg Coetzee's left shoulder, with its densely packed referents, wild lurches in focus, its ultra-plasticity, constant code-switching and innovations in notation ("febu-worry marts aprilll mei"). Language here is not so much on a breeze as blowing at full gale force, from one direction, then the next.

Elsewhere, metaphor, the way that instance is used to introduce a case, the development of argument, remain quirky, even audacious (the take-off into flight of a heron is marked as "a sudden, flouncing, knock-kneed / Holding up of skirts"), but there is an intensification of depth and urgency in Cronin's pitching of consideration against counter-consideration. Not before, in other words, has his mastery of dialectics been so patently apparent.

Throughout, Cronin constructs an amalgam of statements of commitment with an interrogation of motivation, of clarity of intention and perception and of good and bad faith.

The opening prose-poem, a potted autobiography titled Where to begin?, opens with some characteristically laconic observations (in exile in Zambia, his neighbours ask why he and the comrades are fighting, when in South Africa they have Pick 'n Pay), but then moves on to an exploration of the nature and purpose of poetry, a concern Cronin returns to often. "Is poetry the irruption of the suppressed? Or is it a holding onto the faith?"

Several of the poems here reflect back on the struggle years. In a pool of water… is on the life and eventual execution of an MK operative. The tension in this narrative poem is almost unbearable. Another piece, autobiographical, The letter bomber seeks amnesty, could not be more open and searching, though the question holds whether with this subject-matter any degree of openness can be sufficient.

Reflections on history remain central - the adequacy of the present to the aspirations of the past - and, more generally, the notion of forward and reverse momentum and the dynamic between these.

A strategy of freedom fighters on covering their tracks - wearing shoes with heel and sole reversed - provides the starting-point for the observation "you must now try to make / anti-nostalgic tracks / coming away from / to where you are actually bound."

One of Cronin's best-known (and politically contentious) earlier poems, Joe Slovo's Favourite Joke, examined the possibility of a symbiosis between socialism and market forces. The take on this now is sterner, as Cronin records how citizens have been "zombified" into "clients" and public institutions into "contractual service providers".

The bare, incontestable data of poverty are catalogued in the final poem (After more than a casual contact) - such as: "selling a child's shoes, because / you can no longer keep her at school / Or wiping diarrhoea off a bed-ridden aunt / Or pretending to cook the evening meal for so long / a hungry family falls asleep."

Cronin now protests "Solidarity's clenched fist / Just turned / Into a competitive elbow". Yet this protest is embedded (not submerged - it's a question of dialectics again) in a six-part poem on history, on evolution, that is still insistently positive, noting "Small step by step, things, / Bit by bit, / Beginning to knit".

In the end, though, the field of reflection remains open. Cronin names his car's windscreen wipers, "On the one hand", "On the other hand." It is so characteristic of him - and here's the intellectual guts of his work - that the following poem, Symposium on the Mount, records a debate on the meaning of "commonwealth" and the standing of the English language, in which the contributors' voices range from the most sceptical to the most accommodating.

Perhaps the key-note to this demanding, important collection lies in the epigraph to one poem, a graffito from Bogota that proposes "Let's leave pessimism for better times".


 * From: http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3215563**

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