Inwardness and Outwardness. “My Lover’s Back: 79 Love Poems” by M.T.C Cronin and “Bestiary” by Coral Hull. [review]

Abstract

Cronin’s love poetry, and the love it describes, both define themselves by their distance from what we might loosely call the public world: the world of soaps, films, television and the crowd. Cronin’s poems are small, and deliberately so. This smallness is a part of their achievement: a precise and highly polished inwardness. Coral Hull’s poetry is distinctive for the directness — the sheer conviction — of its engagement with the outside world. Hull is always looking at things most of us prefer not to see. In her best poems, the polemic is in the detail, in her attention to the terrible and precise fact of suffering.