Gwen Harwood (1920–1995)

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/gwen-harwood/

This probably isn't a good introduction to Gwen HArwood's poetry. Even though she was in her mid 50s in 1975, it was early in her publishing career.

The book was in Angus & Robertson's 'Poetry Classics' series, and a lot of the poetry labours to live up to a kind of classic dignity. Many of the poems deal with the art and, especially, music, and there's often a sense that the Australian social world is at odds with creativity – not so much cultural cringe as anti-Philistine rage, and the formality of the verse is perhaps a defensive structure. Still, it feels like museum art.

Which makes 'Suburban Sonnet' and 'In the Park', both harsh observations on the toll taken on a woman's life by the social conditions of child-rearing, all the more breathtaking.

It was mainly poems towards the end of the book that I warmed to, that is, poems written closer to the mid-1970s publication: 'Iris', in which the Harwoods, '(husband and wife so long we have forgotten / all singularity)', sail for the first time in a boat they have built and the poet tacks and veers among questions of identity and meaning; 'At Mornington', which I guess is a love poem, certainly a defiance-of-death poem; 'David's Harp', a tale of lost young love; 'Barn Owl', which, well, it's just a good poem.… (more)