O could one write as one makes love when all is given and nothing kept, then language might put by at last its coy elisions and inept withdrawals, yield, and yielding cast aside like useless clothes the crust of worn and shabby use, and trust its candour to the urgent mind its beauty to the searching tongue. Gwen Harwood's work is defined by a moving sensuality, a twinkling irreverence and a sly wit. This anthology brings together the best 100 of her poems, as selected and compiled by her son, the writer John Harwood. “The outstanding Australian poet of the twentieth century” - Peter Porter “Gwen Harwood’s poetry is widely recognised for its stark intimacy and brilliant resonance” - The Sydney Morning Herald Gwen Harwood, one of Australia’s most celebrated poets and librettists, published over 420 works in her lifetime, many of which continue to be studied widely in schools and universities across Australia. She received numerous awards and prizes, including the Patrick White Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1989. She died in 1995, aged seventy-five.

A masterful portrait of a major Australian writer, her incandescent poetry and her battles to be heard in a male-dominated literary establishment. Winner of the 2023 National Biography Award The first biography of Gwen Harwood (1920–1995), one of Australia’s most significant and distinctive poets. Harwood is renowned for her brilliance, but loved for her humour, rebellion and mischief. A public figure by the end of her life, she was always deeply protective of her privacy, and even now, some twenty-six years after her death, little is known of the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems. This book follows Harwood from her childhood in 1920s Brisbane to her final years in Hobart in the 1990s. It traces how a lively, sardonic and determined young woman built a career in the conservative 1950s, blasting her way into the patriarchal strongholds of Australian poetry. Harwood refused to be bound by convention, ‘liberating’ herself, to use her word, before women’s lib existed. Yet she also struggled for much of her life to combine marriage and motherhood with her creative ambitions. In this sense, she is a twentieth-century everywoman. She is also a unique and powerful presence in Australian literary history, a poet who challenged orthodoxies and spoke in a remarkable range of voices. This illuminating, moving biography reveals a deeply passionate figure both at odds with her time and deeply of it, and reclaims and celebrates this important Australian writer. ‘Gwen Harwood, that excellent poet and critic, deserves a sympathetic and lively biography. Ann-Marie Priest, to her credit, has just written that book.’ —Ann Blainey, winner of 2009 National Biography Award 'Read this meticulous biography with Harwood's poetry in hand, and chase down every poem that Priest cites.' —The Sydney Morning Herald 'Ann-Marie Priest has captured completely the sprite-like nature of one of Australia's finest poets… Through these pages, the great poet feels so alive.' —Judges comments, National Biography Award

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Gwen Harwood is celebrated as one of Australia's greatest poets. This is an all-encompassing collection of a lifetime of writing, including poems published just before her death.

In this first study of a female author to be published in Oxford's 'AW' series, Stephanie Trigg has produced a superbly readable and highly provocative account of the work of this central and much-loved Australian poet - the 'Tasmanian mum', as she was so often dismissed, who went on to write some of this country's outstanding lyrics. Aware of Harwood's increasing importance, and the current wave of critical and biographical interest in her life and works, Trigg positions her as a testing ground for feminist poetic criticism in Australia. Thus, in an interview, she asks, 'Who is the "Glenn Harwood" to whom I refer when I write about the poetry of a woman who in recent years has become increasingly public, celebrated and accessible?' Noting that much writing about Harwood has been informed, if not blinkered, by her domestic, even grandmotherly persona and modesty, she asks if this is the best critical vocabulary in which to describe or interpret her poetry. Trigg argues that this biographical model, organized around a corpus of works, signed by a known or theoretically knowable subject, has tended to produce something like heroine-worship. Drawing on Foucault, Trigg focuses on Gwen Harwood' as a poetic signature written by the desires and interests of her readers, rather than as the living subject. She notes that such a Foucauldian project sits in some tension with a feminist insistence on women's lives.

Gwen Harwood has long been recognised as one of Australia's finest poets and librettists. She had a quicksilver intellect and a rare ability to go directly to the heart of whatever occupied her. Generosity of spirit, biting wit, and a superb command of a language characterise both her poetry and her letters to friends.The letters in this edition - written between 1943 and her death in 1995 - present a strong claim that Gwen Harwood be considered this country's greatest letter-writer. The selection includes less than one-tenth of the letters transcribed by her biographer Gregory Kratzmann. Half of the letters here were written to her good friend Tony Riddell, to whom she dedicated all but the last of her volumes of poetry. Her correspondents include major figures from the fields of literature, art and music in Australia, and her love of letter-writing shows the value she accorded to friendship.

This book offers a comprehensive and original reading of Australian poetry, from the colonial period to the present, through the dual lenses of Romanticism and negativity. Paul Kane argues that the absence of Romanticism functions as a crucial presence in the poetry of all the major Australian poets. This absence or negativity is both thematic and structural, and Kane's scrupulous analyses uncover important relations between Romanticism and negativity. Chapters on nine individual poets explore and substantiate the theoretical claims informed by the work of contemporary critics of Romanticism and by various philosophers of negativity. These chapters can serve as a series of self-contained readings of Australian poets for the use of students, scholars, and informed general readers. Australian Poetry is unique in its sustained argument and theoretical sophistication.