In the first, mainly biographical, chapter, Jennifer Strauss identifies her own position as being with those ‘who wish to resist deconstruction’s collapsing of author and text into “a succession of sentences”’ and traces in Harwood’s life some of the sources of, and influences on, her poetry. This account is, inevitably (given that biography is not the main purpose of the study), somewhat sketchy. Despite a salutary suspicion that, in interviews, Gwen Harwood is ‘admirably deft at establishing the boundaries of openness in her own terms’, Jennifer Strauss shows a qualified readiness to accept her statement to Stephen Edgar that the ‘I’ of her poems is ‘entirely an operatic I’, except in those cases when the poem is addressed to a particular person. The position is in fact more complicated than this. Gwen Harwood is an expert in the deployment of multiple speaking voices which include the ‘I’ who addresses identified friends and relatives, the ‘1’ who meditates while walking on the littoral zone between land and water or who fishes in the waters of D’Entrecasteaux Channel, as well as the different versions of the ‘1’ who speak from the pseudonymous masks and disguises. And, in prose, there is ‘Gwennie’, the child narrator of the short stories.

There are also the voices of the massive sequences of personal letters signed ‘Gwen’, written first by a red-haired twenty-three-year-old to Thomas Riddell and, later, by the established poet Gwen Harwood to friends and fellow poets, such as Vin cent Buckley and A. D. Hope. A further complication is the occasional glimpse in the poetry of a red-haired mischievous child (‘The Wasps’) or schoolgirl (‘Prize-Giving’). The cumulative portrait is sufficiently pervaded by parody, self-reference and multiple perspectives to satisfy the most devoted postmodernist.

Jennifer Strauss alludes to these issues in the first chapter and implies their complexities in the readings of particular poems in subsequent chapters, but she wisely does not undertake the difficult task of exploring them in depth. Instead, she gives an interesting and informative survey of the biography as it relates to the poetry, although, in my view, she underestimates the extent of the homesickness and sense of exile experienced by Gwen Harwood in chilly Tasmania, and, misleadingly, suggests that the ‘dear perpetual place’ of her poetry is Southern Tasmania rather than the radiant Brisbane of childhood. (There are, incidentally, several factual errors in the chapter: the poets John Berryman and James Dickey appear, oddly, as Robert Berryman and James Dickeyman; F.W. Harwood was in the navy in the Second World War, not the army; ‘The Glass Boy’, first published in April 1982, does not anticipate ‘The Wasps’ which was first published in Overland in 1974.)

It is in the subsequent chapters that the real strengths of Jennifer Strauss’s book become increasingly apparent in the detailed, sensitive and complex reading of in­ dividual poems and the organisation of these readings into the arguments that make up the individual chapters.

The second part, which is made up of three chapters, deals with the position of the self in relation to the boundary conditions imposed by time, the flesh and nature. In the first of these (Chapter 2), the poem ‘Boundary Conditions’ receives extensive analysis which demonstrates the centrality to Gwen Harwood’s poetic concerns of its opposition between ‘modern scientific rationalism and traditional humanist thought’. Other related poems about the mind/matter, flesh/spirit dichotomies receive equally perceptive analyses, although it is difficult to see in the, for me, bleak poem, ‘Bone Scan’, the ‘something like joy’ that Jennifer Strauss discerns there. Her reading of ‘1 am the Captain of My Soul’ is challenging and thoroughly argued on the basis of the text and has given me a new perspective on my own reading of that seminal poem. Chapter 3 deals with poems related to sexual love. It is here that she locates a full and detailed analysis of the Eisenhart poems. (Krote, who is usually discussed with Eisenbart, is, quite appropriately, treated in the concluding chapter on Art.)

In Chapter 4, the complex relationship between the self and the natural world is illuminated in terms of the tensions between individual human mortality and natural cyclical renewal. However, the process of memory in ‘Alla Siciliana’ is, I believe, more complex than Jennifer Strauss suggests. Childhood and the landscape of the present moment are linked by the music which belongs neither to the immediate present nor to the remote past but to an experience that links the two in the consciousness of the speaker. (Gwen Harwood’s comments on this poem make clear that the title and the dedication belong to an adult experience in the 1960s in Hobart.)

­­­The chapters I read with the greatest interest and pleasure are those of Part 3 that deal with the defiance of mortality through creation – through motherhood and ––art. The chapter on motherhood brings together poems such as ‘Burning Sappho’, ‘An Old Wife's Tale’, ‘An Impromptu for Ann Jennings’ and ‘In the Park’ (which receives a somewhat eccentric interpretation) with passages from Blessed City dealing with Gwen Harwood’s relationship with her own mother. The concluding chapter on Art is similarly stimulating and the discussion of ‘Night Thoughts: Baby and Demon’ provides a persuasive explanation of the couplet section – an aspect of this complex and beautiful poem that previously puzzled me.

The appendices, notes and bibliography provide a meticulous collection of invaluable auxiliary material. Again and again in reading this book I had the sense both of pleased recognition and of being challenged by new perceptions. In all large statements of theme Jennifer Strauss has independently arrived at similar patterns to those examined in my own Gwen Harwood: the Real and Imagined World. But, despite these congruences of central position, our arguments are sometimes divergent and often complementary. Jennifer Strauss opens up fresh and stimulating perspectives with her sensitively argued analysis of Gwen Harwood’s poetry.