Notes on Sweeping Things

Paul Croucher

“Lucid and spare, these poems alight in consciousness the way sunlight caresses a leaf.”
—Patricia Sykes

“Bountiful poems that show how sheerness is still unmatched when it comes to tangling with immensity.”
—Toby Davidson

“This is a poetry of mindfulness, of balance, and of measure. A poetry that is at home in Nepal or at the football, in a Buddhist monastery or in Brunswick. A realism — that has its feet in the backyard and its head in the clouds.”
—πo

“Reading these economical and elegant poems is like wandering in a forest where the trees, though lean of branch and leaf, cast a paradoxically large amount of shade. And always to the ear the bubbling of a mirthful snowmelt stream … Refreshing. Unique. A joy.”
—Mal McKimmie

“This is not just a poetry of great warmth and humour. Paul Croucher is unlike most contemporary poets in his commitment to the psychoacoustics of the line and line break, and this collection could almost be read as a primer in the short line, demonstrating again and again its gravity and its possibility. Following the lead of Niedecker, the poems work between fact and song, always somehow landing on their feet. They are both deeply literary and democratic in inclination. Ultimately they are optimistic, of and for ‘these ordinary / end of days.’”
—Tim Wright

“Although The Landing is Paul Croucher’s first volume, it has the assuredness of coming from someone who has been writing a long time, as though he had heeded Horace’s advice to keep each poem in a drawer for ten years before publishing. WH Auden claimed an advantage of formal verse was that it freed one from the fetters of the ego. Croucher’s free verse poems have been slowly pared back in the footsteps of Americans such as Robert Creeley, as he searches for an essential clarity liberated of ego and rhetoric … Croucher has [also] a deft touch for line breaks, and gives weight and balance to each word, as if stanzas aspired to be a collection of porcelain vases.”
—Simon West, in The Australian

“Always centred in the now and this, here we are offered a wondrous, hard-won mastery of enjambment and an imagistic, undeniably Zen-inspired playfulness of mind which clears all but the essential from the space of the poem. With the gentle humour of knowing he is always (im)perfectly himself, Paul challenges us to read slowly, and carefully. Finding sweetness in astringency, presence in motion, and the “perfect / vertical / fall” of words trickling down the spine of the page, each piece ends in a pool of some sort of humble realisation: one either light or filled with light.”
—Matt Hetherington