Hume Cronyn
My Brother Who Dances with Sunflowers
Hume Cronyn is one of the most original poets writing today in Canada. Honed over decades of inspired writing and meticulously crafted, Cronyn's poetry is thematically rich, authentically brilliant and always illuminating.
"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
"Of course, I don't have a brother. Of course, I do have a brother, a brother who is a dreamer, who is anarchistic, playful, loves children, goats, has an obsession with elephants, who dances with sunflowers, yammers away with turtles living beneath his bed, who eats peanut_butter & bacon sandwiches at midnight with his dinner companion the wind, sings the mysterious songs of giraffes, lives in a house cluttered with ladders. There's a need to have a brother, a sister like this as a source of sustenance, a source of rebellion, a source of survival in a world threatened by wars, environmental catastrophe, technological overwhelm."
- from the Preface, Hume Cronyn
"...the magical, the transcendent, 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
"...one of the best books I've read in a long time, an undogmatic manifesto that's anarchistic, funny, and mad. OIt'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 - fill me with wonder. The poems are willfully raw and honest, compelled by defiance, joy, anger and wild whitelight 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
Hume Cronyn lived and worked 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. For the past 35 years, he has worked in a drop-in centre for psychiatric survivors in Toronto where he loves. He has published five books of poetry, Birdhouse Contributions ( Slow Dance, England, 1993 ), Bake my Brain ( Mosaic Press, 1993 ), Rotten Poetry Fish ( Mosaic Press, 2000 ), don't ask me to clean up the basement ( Mosaic Press, 2009 ), Inauspicious Times ( Mosaic Press, 2022 ). He has also co-edited with Stephen Watts and Richard McKane Voices of Conscience: Poetry of Conscience ( Iron Press, England, 1995 ), and edited with Chris Beyers Let's Face it! Writing and Artwork from the Parkdale Activity & Recreation Centre ( Mosaic Press 2011).