A Ticket to Trilce by MTC Cronin

"Cronin's remaking, re-envisaging, re-creation of César Vallejo's astonishing masterpiece Trilce enables a re-imagining of many of Vallejo's lifelong obsessions: childhood, the family unit, poverty, injustice and the anarchic joy of language. Just as in Vallejo there is an intimate self-exposure taking place alongside and within the disruption of language. The social structures that marginalise people and their experiences are seen as embodied in the language structures and conventions rigidified in traditional poetic and prosaic structures. Cronin, just like Vallejo, seeks to break both open. All the levels of life—the banal, the most elevated, the erotic, the pragmatic— collapse into each other. A joyous sense of multiple voices liberates the poetic from tired patterns: "All these things we use for walls/ when the walls fall down!" (XVIII). Much of Cronin's play with Vallejo's 1922 experimental sequence originates in the gender difference between herself and Vallejo and the humour to be found in male-centred assumptions. A Ticket to Trilce provides admission to a private female stocktake of an early 20th Century classic in a contemporary Australian setting. A lover of Vallejo herself, Cronin provides us with a passport to another version of his great vision." —Peter Boyle