'The point is to deal with the stuff itself,’ wrote John Berryman. He was referring to Randall Jarrell, paragon of mid-century poet-critics – one who did, indeed, deal with the stuff itself, writing of poetry with the practical competence of a mechanic who knew his way around an engine, having built a few himself – but he could just as easily be speaking of Barry Hill.

With eleven collections of poetry of his own to date, and a decade spent as poetry editor of The Australian, Hill, it’s fair to observe, has worked both sides of the bar. Most of the pieces collected here, mainly but not exclusively poetry reviews, date from his time at the newspaper. They have the plainness and concision – the breezy, non-technical appreciation – that criticism for a broad public readership demands.

 Yet there is something about Hill’s approach that raises his reviews above the general run of arts journalism, with its perennial temptations to stale repetition, picking winners and losers, sliding the hatchet from its sheath. He rather views poems as gifts, ceremonial offerings made from craft, talent, passion, and words. Existing as gifts do in a space outside or in tension with the political economy of the market, poems gain in value through generous circulation rather than jealous hoarding. The criticism in Eggs for Keeps should be viewed as an attempt to use whatever means are available to increase the circulation of the poem as a gift.

All of which means the fork is tuned mainly to the key of admiration here. Of A Passing Bell, American poet Paul Kane’s extended piece of grief-work for his wife, Tina Kane, written in a contemporary version of the ancient ghazal lyric employed by the Sufis, Hall writes: ‘It is a book you read if you are wanting evidence of love, as the perfection of its writing is – like the impact of its reading – a kind of revelation.’

 But love is not blind to human frailty, only accepting. Here is Hill catching Berthold Brecht, a poet he deeply admires, in the often-unedifying round: