The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets

After lamenting the lack of women poets in a number of then-contemporary Australian poetry anthologies Helen Thompson in Australian Book Review noted that this anthology "flings down the gauntlet, as it were, with a gender-specific survey, challenging categorisation based on genre or theme." She went on to comment that "gender-specific collections of writing such as this one does make possible a contrasting ‘centring’ of female experience which demands assessment on its own terms."^[3]

Reviewing the anthology for The Age Literary Review Anne Diamond stated: "The collection's feminist challenge to the male dominance in Australian poetry lies in the diversity of its own vested interests; the acknowledged plurality of feminism represented by the differing positions of migrant, Aboriginal, lesbian and colonial women in Australian history. Although this is the anthology's strongest feature it is also a necessary compromise; in one sense, the book attempts a politics of plurivocality with the basic empirical assumptions of the anthology form itself."^[4]

The Oxford Literary History of Australia said, of the anthology, that the editors' "focus was on poetry as well as on politics, and the work is of a high standard, with a particular emphasis, perhaps reflecting the editors' own taste, on satire."^[5]

The Cambridge History of Australian Literature called this anthology a landmark "in the affirmation of a collective notion of women's poetry in Australia."^[6]

• 1986 in Australian literature