Judith Wright's collection of talks given "because she was invited" has as its first concern poetry in general. [Because I Was Invited] also presents a further group of poets treated in the manner of her previous book Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. The great merit of that book lay in her rejection of the usual critical approach, with its emphasis on style and technique at the expense of theme and philosophy….

In the broadest sense the issue of conservation underlies the entire work. Blake's strictures on the evils of "single vision" are central to her argument….

For all the seriousness and the prophetic content of her message these talks are never sermons. She is too good a poet to generalize. Her detail is always concrete, sharp, significant, whether in quotations selected from the poets she discusses, incidents that have occurred in the melancholy grind of teaching her poetry in schools, or facts painstakingly amassed….

[Her first book, The Moving Image,] with its formidable introductory title poem is the work of a practised poet….

[The title poem] was composed after the other poems in the book. It is richer in universal statement than in particulars, many of its key themes and images having been presented in sharper focus in such poems as "Northern River", "Dust", "Country Town", and "The Company of Lovers" (itself a poem veering to the universal rather than, as so often, sending "a shaft trembling in the central gold"—Judith Wright's own image …)…. Indeed, the most commonly heard objection to her poetry as it progressed was that its author "had gone too philosophical"….

[I would rate Alive, Poems 1971–72 highly], if only for its return to those flashing images drawn from ordinary domesticity that reverberate in the reader's mind…. And who in English since Hardy or Mew (except Judith Wright herself elsewhere) has written a love elegy as inevitable as "Lake in Spring" in that volume? The slimness of this book belies its value: the work is a careful distillation of years of criticism and love.