[Mr. FitzGerald] is distinctly metaphysical. He is more concerned, as he always has been, to apprehend a permanent spirit of the universe amid time passing than to set down any specifically Australian manifestation of time present. Sparing of words, yet lacking the gregariousness of his countrymen, he feels himself akin to the wise man of Anglo-Saxon poetry, sitting apart in thought…. At times his language is too tightly held, the expression stripped down to basic thought; and though he unrolls the long, complex verse sentence with sureness, it is not always easy to follow the turn within turn of his thought. But of course he is not a poet to be read lightly or quickly. The measured, meditative manner is rock-based. It probes down through the strata of time's evidences and mankind's memory, not with "logic's rope" but with mind's sharp "knife-edge at the throat of darkness". In these latest poems [in Southmost Twelve] his apprehension of the cold approaches of age and death intensifies his affirmation of the undying spirit of life.