Parables, according to [theologian C. H.] Dodd, are "illustrations … designed to provoke thought rather than to close the question." Many of Josephine Miles's New and Selected Poems would fit Dodd's description very well. The didactic freshness of her poems makes them a complex pleasure, because, for her, pleasure itself is complex…. Her work may begin with an appearance as diminished or domestic as the doily, upholstery or curtains, but it ends as much more than a remark or perception, but rather as a little sermon without a pulpit. Her demotic phrases may be daunting, but her poetry is concerned with the value of fact and the fact of value. It is a rich collection and capable of a Dantesque fierceness. (pp. 230-31)

Josephine Miles's poetry is generous and full. Abundant and not merely copious, it reminds us that the domestic scene is as rich as any wilderness…. Laurence Lieberman has remarked on the poet's desire for and belief in a "community of the heart" and in Josephine Miles's best work the slowly revealed parable is a model for such cohesiveness, and slowly unveiled intimacies. Her poetry speaks of the ambiguities of unity, in which it is possible to question, sadly and fully: "Am I going away to your nearest distance?"

In Josephine Miles, the satisfactory and the unsatisfactory, as topics, the traditional resource and our agonies of resourcelessness, mingle and make a moderate poetry. Our favorite notion is that of a poetry open and flexible and never merely free, a poetry of wholeness conjuring up that recalcitrant old concept of sophrosyne. This maximalism in an age of competing minimalisms might be our curiously unprogrammatic programme. The only thing eclecticism cannot contain adequately is the advantage of dogmatics, but we will accept this deficiency. (pp. 231-32)