The Law of Poetry
MTC (‘Margie’) Cronin; Puncher & Wattmann, 2015; 261 pages; $29.95 (paperback)
One lazy Sunday afternoon (according to Chapter 2 of the Book of Mark), Jesus and some of his disciples wandered through a grain field, picking a few heads of grain. The Pharisees asked him why they would do that given that it was unlawful to do so on the Sabbath. Ever the pragmatist, Jesus replied that ‘The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.’ Implying, that God’s commandments are uttered for the benefit of his people, not as tools of oppression. A similar theme (albeit one perhaps more grounded in 19th Century English Romanticism rather than theism) seems to motivate the creative work of MTC Cronin in The Law of Poetry, especially given the choice of epigraph: ‘True laws aren’t manmade, they make man’.