'This new Selected of Jennifer Maiden's poetry was chosen by her from her twenty-two poetry collections and five novels. The poems chosen are now arranged approximately in the order they were written. The cover depicts the author and a rope swing, as such a swing could represent many aspects of her work: its technical rhythmic continuity, like metronomic beats of poetry, the possibility of moving weightlessly between levels of a hierarchy in trauma, and being able to survive the problem of evil in a space between an ideal and what is real, all happening with the author keeping hold of the ropes and in control of speed and direction. This Selected glides from 1967 to 2018, between the personal, the political, between levels of lucent life study and platforms where those in power can speak with the person who inspired them across time. It spans her first collections, Tactics and The Problem of Evil to her latest collection, Appalachian Fall, new uncollected work and the recent verse and prose novels. For the first time, all the collection poems involving the characters from Play With Knives, human right's observers Clare (who murdered her siblings as a child) and George (her ex-probation officer and her partner) are included. The entire Selection has 228 poems - wild succinct poems to expansive ineradicable classic poems from her collections, which have received accolades such as the ALS Gold Medal, The Victorian Prize for Literature, three Kenneth Slessor Prizes, two C.J. Dennis Prizes, two Age Poetry Book of the Year Awards, The overall Age Book of the Year, The Christopher Brennan Award for Lifetime Achievement and a shortlisting in the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Here the poems build into an unshakable, timeless, transcendent momentum.' (Publication summary)
'Jennifer Maiden’s first books, Tactics (1974) and The Problem of Evil (1975), introduced a fantastically complex and enquiring poetry, with strangely fragmentary assemblages of character wrought from conflict. Both books were partly inspired by television’s gory nightly footage of the Vietnam War. While much poetry in the 1970s was of seditiously unvarnished protest, Maiden’s was intricate and stylised, poems toppling with moral dilemmas and extraordinary images, or restrained in pure lyricism such as ‘The Windward Side’: ‘The island has a windward side / walkless long and crossless wide / & winds across the cliff-face ride: / a woman’s face / caved in with pride / that craves for every blow.’ (Introduction)
'Jennifer Maiden’s first books, Tactics (1974) and The Problem of Evil (1975), introduced a fantastically complex and enquiring poetry, with strangely fragmentary assemblages of character wrought from conflict. Both books were partly inspired by television’s gory nightly footage of the Vietnam War. While much poetry in the 1970s was of seditiously unvarnished protest, Maiden’s was intricate and stylised, poems toppling with moral dilemmas and extraordinary images, or restrained in pure lyricism such as ‘The Windward Side’: ‘The island has a windward side / walkless long and crossless wide / & winds across the cliff-face ride: / a woman’s face / caved in with pride / that craves for every blow.’ (Introduction)
