Inauspicious Times | Hume Cronyn

Hume Cronyn

Inauspicious Times | Hume Cronyn

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“Writing is my way to travel into interior countries of darkness & light & bring back stories, snapshots, fragments to astonish, to nourish, to challenge.”

- Hume Cronyn

Hume Cronyn lived in England for twenty years before returning to Canada in the late 1990’s. He has worked as a stock broker, a short-order chef, a roustabout on an oil rig, a lecturer in Greek mythology and Modern Literature. He has worked on & off for the past 35 years at a drop-in centre for psychiatric survivors in Toronto. He has published four books of poetry, Birdhouse Contributions ( Slow dancer, England), Bake My Brain ((Mosaic Press, 1993 ),Rotten poetry fish ( Mosaic Press, 2000), don’t ask me to clean up the basement ( Mosaic Press, 2009). He co-edited with Stephen Watts and Richard McKane, Voices of Conscience ( Iron Press, England), and co-edited with Chris Beyers Let’s Face it! Writing and Artwork from the Parkdale Activity & Recreation Centre ( Mosaic Press 2011).

 

Hume Cronyn’s work has received wide critical acclaim:

“...one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, an undogmatic manifesto that’s anarchistic, funny, and mad. It’s so good I’m grateful to it that I didn’t want it to end. Everything about this book – its energy, fierce comic wisdom, its stuffed and muscled lines –fills me with wonder. The poems are willfully raw and honest, compelled by defiance, joy, anger and wild white-light hope...I have never read a book that took Whitman further and took me, exhilarated, out of myself into the traffic jam, the mess of humanity.”

- Margaret Sweatman, Books in Canada

“This is impressive poetry. It is brilliant and able to enter into the heart of desperate and disturbed feelings, illuminating them and expressing them with insight and beauty.”

- Stella Stocker, Orbis

“...the magical, the transcedant, the stuff of strange dreams and familiar dreams just beyond the edges of the ordinary. The structures vary considerably...echoing Whitman and the loosely balanced verse of the Old Testament...”

- Tony Charles, Odyssey

  Hume Cronyn is one of the most original poets writing today in Canada. Mosaic Press is elated to publish two new collections of his poetry, honed over some years of inspired writing and meticulously crafted. Cronyn’s writing is thematically rich, authentically brilliant and always illuminating.