About half of the hundred poems presented in this volume – chosen by Harwood’s son, the writer John Harwood – were first published when the poet was in her sixties and seventies (she died in 1995, aged seventy-five). Given that her first book appeared when she was forty-three, this split seems about right. The relative emphasis on the later work means that some of the classic poems of the earlier period have had to be sacrificed; there is only one Professor Eisenbart poem, for instance, and the infamous acrostic sonnets Harwood managed to slip into the Bulletin in 1961 are missing. But the gain is evident in the last third of the book, where the reader is treated to a string of masterpieces. Far from being calm and transcendental, these late poems grapple with the fear of death, beginning with the brilliant ‘hospital’ poem, ‘The Night Watch’, in which the poet lies awake ‘playing / intellectual variations’ on the Savings Bank sign she can see through the window:

Save and be saved. No use
to me, I can save nothing.
Only watch, in my sleepless
journey towards a grounding
I dare not think about,
the neon sign revolving.

Then come the poems in which, waking to ‘birdsong, lessening darkness’ (‘Visitor’), fishing from her dinghy (‘Crow-Call’, ‘Mid-Channel’), or putting the kettle on as the news begins (‘Morning Again’), the poet confronts what the inimitable Crab, in ‘Night and Dreams’, calls the ‘great questions’ and their ‘wavering answers’. As ever, Harwood’s use of dreams, rhymes, and wordplay brings a beguiling lightness to this enterprise. What could be more comic and terrible than the jaunty collision of Edward Lear’s unlikely lovers with Baudelaire’s sinister darkness in ‘The Owl and the Pussycat Baudelaire Rock’? Or the awesome figure of Crab, swirling his ‘velvet- / seaweed cloak’ as he reproaches the poet, with awful puns and wince-worthy jokes, for eating him sixty years ago?

‘Harwood is very much a poet of memory’

Harwood is very much a poet of memory, and in both late and early works evokes her childhood and youth in vivid narratives. The wonderful ‘The Secret Life of Frogs’ and the four poems that make up ‘Class of 1927’ are dazzling short stories in their own right. As well, this volume includes a generous selection of Harwood’s tender and passionate lyrics to or about her friend and former art teacher Vera Cottew (not always identified here), as well as her paeans to love and music for composer Rex Hobcroft.

Gwen Harwood (photograph by Alec Bolton, courtesy of the NLA [nla.pic-an14465956-1-v])

The much-anthologised, proto-feminist classics from the 1960s are also here: ‘In the Park’, ‘Suburban Sonnet’, and the furious ‘Burning Sappho’ – a name Harwood sometimes applied, with all kinds of irony, to herself. It is hard to imagine now, but ‘In the Park’, when it first appeared, drew much opprobrium for its depiction of a woman oppressed by the tyranny of caring for young children. Having been asked once too often whether she loved her own children, Harwood took to disowning the poem, insisting that she herself was not identical with the ‘she’ of her text. Unsurprisingly, her playful reworking of this poem and of ‘Suburban Sonnet’ some thirty years on in ‘Later Texts’ (also included here) begins: ‘She sits in the park, wishing she’d never written / about that dowdy housewife and her brood.’ Yet Harwood does not revise the central theme of these early poems: that motherhood can be burdensome, taking an often unacknowledged toll on a woman’s dreams for herself.

‘Later Texts’ also revisits ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, one of Harwood’s Bulletin acrostics. The original poem spelled out ‘So Long Bulletin’, and Harwood always insisted that it, along with its companion piece, ‘Abelard to Eloisa’, had no literary merit. As far as she was concerned, any poem written purely to form an acrostic was necessarily rubbish. Yet her new version of ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, complete with the benign acrostic ‘Bless the Editor’, is a lovely work, reflecting with humour and irony on how time tempers the passions of youth. ‘Eventually,’ Eloisa tells Abelard, ‘one leaves Heartbreak Hotel.’

‘If Harwood herself finally left Heartbreak Hotel, many of her poems document her occasional residence there’

If Harwood herself finally left Heartbreak Hotel, many of her poems document her occasional residence there. Some of her racier love poems are missing from this selection: neither of the ‘Carnal Knowledge’ poems features, for instance. But with a poet of so many moods, so many voices, so many gifts, any selection calls for hard choices. Beyond the impossible imperative to choose the ‘best’ poems, it is not clear what editorial principles were applied in this volume, as there is no introduction. There is no scholarly apparatus at all, in fact – no front matter, no notes, no index. But it doesn’t matter. Thanks to the superb editorial work of Gregory Kratzmann and Alison Hoddinott on the Collected Poems (2003), the often fascinating context for these poems is available elsewhere. This elegant volume seems designed purely for pleasure, and in this purpose it entirely succeeds.