'Good for the Soul: John Curtin’s Life with Poetry is many things at once: an extended act of (great-grand) filial piety, an important supplementary work of biography, as well as a blow-by-blow literary/historical account of a great man’s unusual and consuming interest in poetry and the uses to which to put it. With so many different intentions it would be difficult and probably unfair to judge it by the criteria associated with any one of them.' (Introduction)