Poems 1980–2008 selects from Jan Owen’s first five collections and adds eighty pages of new poems. This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, travels through Europe and Asia – encyclopedic ideas and sinuous, crafted language.

In the final poem, ‘The Offhand Angel’, Owen’s ‘I’ flirts with a decidedly male muse, ‘her strange attractor’, who is prompting about the craft of writing: ‘Is this being a metaphor? he sends. / “Is this metaphor a being?” she writes. /… / A bead of sweat on your lip, he whispers, / leaning close. “Ah feathers of sun!” /… “Come through,” she says, “Come in”.’