Gwen Harwood (1920–1995) is one of the best loved Australian poets of the twentieth century – and a fierce prankster, who published poems under half-a-dozen names and identities. By turns poignant, sensuous and mischievous, passionately musical, her poetry is marked by sure intelligence and a quicksilver, anti-authoritarian wit. This new selection of her poetry from 1943 to her death makes the full range of the work accessible for the first time to poetry-lovers in the northern hemisphere. With an introduction by the leading Harwood critic Gregory Kratzmann and the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who corresponded with Harwood, the selection includes hitherto little-known work along with poems which have become part of the central canon of Australian poetry.
