Books by M. T. C. Cronin

A small black cat wakes in the box in which it was carried to a dump and makes its way home through the drains. The only change in the divine realm is that there is no longer anyone or anything guarding the gates of the dead. - 'Downpayment on a Catastrophe'The simplest of places that at every moment confronts with fresh ambiguities: 'The world's yard': is it a tree-lined garden where children are playing? or the yard where a yardarm is erected, the executioner's noose always dangling? or the boneyard where heretic and believer lie side by side to whisper their shared confidences? 'Carnivorous laughter filters through the woods.' Isn't it always so?'It's not uncommon to know one has fallen through a trapdoor. Cronin is one of those rare writers who understands that, beyond the trapdoor, we are stranded with God at the endermost end of the world.' - Elena Navronskaya Blanco'There are many ways to smuggle explosives into a poem. To construct a space at the back of the world's yard, to sit there calmly among the flowerbeds while God wanders absent-mindedly in and out - could there be a better way to conceal the dynamite of beauty, the gelignite of unexpected openings of truth?' - Ricardo Xavier Bousoño'Lashings of beauty, lashings of perplexity. My standard cynicism finds no standing place. I surrender to the miracle of Cronin's poetry.' - Lazlo Thalassa

"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. This is a poetry that shoulders the big questions.

"Notebook of Signs" is the first 'notebook' is a collection of four separate 'notebooks', which demonstrates the author's mastery in the area of short lyrics.

Consisting of 100 parts, the line-count in this work arcs from one line in part I to 50 lines in part 50, and thence back down to one in part 100 with parts of equal line-counts making mirroring pairs. Like many forms, self-imposed or otherwise, Cronin uses this apparently restrictive structure to support an original unfolding of verse.