The Law of Poetry

Written over a period of two decades, The Law of Poetry contains poems that pay personal tributes to 'things' - broccoli, ducks and concrete - as well as poems that seek to physically enter the realm of abstract concepts - chance, kindness and explanations. Set out in alphabetical order - as if a dictionary of essences - each poem is titled 'The Law of Something', be that 'The Law of Absolutes', 'The Law of the Child, Lost' or 'The Law of Rubber Gloves'. The reader is asked not to judge - as law stereotypically demands - but to engage with this very idiosyncratic world of the individual poet and to be injected, like the shrunken travellers in the 1966 classic, Fantastic Voyage, into the nervous system of another. "The Law of Poetry achieves a near perfect expression of freedom in poems that mix a dazzling intuition with a subtle conusance of the ambivalence of legality. Here, uniquely, law evaporates into ideas." - Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law & Director of Law and Humanities, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, New York. MTC Cronin has published twenty books (poetry, prose poems and essays), several of which have appeared in translation including her 2001 book, Talking to Neruda's Questions. Cronin has studied arts, law and literature and worked for many years in the field of legal research. The Law of Poetry, alongside an earlier work, Squeezing Desire Through a Sieve ~ Micro-essays on Judgement & Justice, reflects a personal history of coming to poetry through the law.