Poems (Harwood collection)

In a review of several poetry collections in The Bulletin H. P. Heseltine called this volume the best of the group. He went on: "Gwen Harwood is blessed with a further major item in the equipment of a poet: the ability habitually to translate and compress her experience into image and metaphor. Time and time again one is struck by the originality and power with which her language renders feeling and thought. Beneath the lyric melody of the lines, one is made unmistakably aware of a genuine verbal complexity."^[3]

Dennis Douglas in The Age newspaper began his review of the book by stating that "Gwen Harwood is a soiphisticated poet writing for a sophisticated audience. She likes to play with ideas and to parody intellectual conversations. She tends to cultivate a slightly recherche diction...Her style can be direct, sensative, fanciful, or incisive, but the surface it presents is always complex, witty, and brilliantly articulate."^[4]

• 1963 in Australian literature