This generous-sized collection contains all six published volumes, as well as most of Gwen Harwood's uncollected poems. It is the outcome of several years of collecting and research by editors who have specialised in Harwood's work. With an incisive Introduction and extensive notes providing background to particular poems or obscure references, their treatment allows several entry levels into the work of this provocative and multi-talented writer.

Harwood's own biographical notes on the pseudonymous selves she adopted in her poems of the 1960s and 1970s add further value. Readers knew them as Walter Lehmann, the Tasmanian farmer and author of the Bulletin hoax acrostic sonnets of 1961; Francis Geyer, the young Hungarian refugee; Miriam Stone, the frustrated housewife; and Timothy Kline, the Vietnam protester.