Written in response to:
When a reviewer praises a book as ‘a major achievement’ and then devotes a further 4000 words to finding fault with its rationale, you can be pretty sure that the fault-finding and the so-called ‘major achievement’ are connected, otherwise why would you bother? In his review, Jeff Sparrow provides some useful commentary on Lesbia Harford’s political and intellectual sympathies, and he is entitled, of course, to frame her work along these lines. Like Sylvia Plath, Harford does seem susceptible to claims of ownership by various groups of readers, each pushing a distinct barrow of some kind. It will be clear to anyone who reads my edition, however, that I have attempted to distance her poetry from this sort of appropriation in the hope that its qualities will speak for themselves.
Oliver Dennis
Melbourne