The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry: Winner 2005

Judges report
<More Or Less Than>1-100  by MTC Cronin (Shearsman Books)

MTC Cronin’s latest book is a single structure, the development of ideas impressively sustained within the arc of the whole; its formal device is an increase of line-length with each piece of the book-length poem until it reaches fifty (Nos. 50 and 51), and then shrinkage, poem by poem, back to one. In Cronin’s hands, the result is startlingly effective, as if the book is an entire slow respiration, out and in. The language of this meditation on speech and experience – richly allusive to human occasions - is sensuous, intelligent, and passionate.