This volume edited and with invaluable notes by Alison Hoddinott, comprises Gwen Harwood’s fascinating, unexpurgated letters to Alison and Bill Hoddinott, during four crucial years from 1960-1964, a period which can be described as Harwood’s creative floreat.  They are also years in which her life-long relationships with A.D. Hope, James McAuley and Vincent Buckley begin, her friendships with Vivian and Sybille Smith and others consolidate, and in which Harwood was briefly notorious for her scandalous Bulletin acrostics and her confounding publication under several male pseudonyms.

Approximately 10% of these letters have appeared already, in A Steady Storm of Correspondence (2001), but here we not only have the unedited versions, revealing even more than that volume, the complex and not always kind and tactful personality of Harwood (who more than once urges the Hoddinotts to ‘burn these letters’), but numerous others which it might have been felt unwise to publish earlier, and from which not everyone – even Harwood herself – emerges unscathed.  The collection is rich in insights not only into Harwood’s mind, working methods, and circle, but also into the literary politics of one of the key periods in modern Australian poetry.

Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) has long been recognised as one of Australia’s finest poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Her floreat was in the 1960s, when she was also briefly infamous for the notorious acrostic poems published unwittingly by the Bulletin in 1961. She was a friend and protege of A.D. Hope, and of such other key figures of the period as Vincent Buckley and James McAuley.  With these and numerous others she was also a fascinating and unbridled correspondent.