AustLit

Epigraph: . . . [Harwood] was one of those poets I grew up with, care of my mother who taught Harwood’s poetry in high-school literature classes for decades . . . I don’t have a copy at hand, but if I recall correctly, it carried that wonderfully warm yet seemingly austere (to a fifteen-year-old boy) picture of her in a collared dress with page-boy hair looking as if she’d come out of a country Anglican choir. Then there were the poems, graceful and savage at once, clever and ‘sensual’. They seemed to allow place and human experience of place to commune, and to observe the potentially horrific outcomes . . . Poetry isn’t about comfort and conformity for me; it’s about disturbance and action. Harwood was always about action in her quiet (and sometimes quite rowdy and obsessive) ways. (Kinsella p. 12-13)