Grace Perry: Selected Poems

At a time when Australian poetry is booming Perry is leading the field… Her place in the changing climate of opinion and taste will be a key one.
– Dr James Tulip, 1968

In her publishing ventures and her own creative writing Perry was a leading presence standing apart from the traditionalist regard for formal line and classical modes… In her early poetry she often explored her medical experience with all the impressionistic precision and wit of William Carlos Williams and was considered at the time as shocking. Red Scarf was widely published overseas… Later she draws surf imagery from her house at Bilgola and finally from the Magistrate's House and her Simmental bulls in Berrima… The seasons of Winter and Autumn,… flowering bulbs. poplar trees, granite and limestone are celebrated… as she explores the human concerns of …mental health, love regret and what is unattainable.
– Dr Phillip Hall, 2021

Her greatest achievement lies in her development of the longer sequences in which repetitions of sounds, words, themes and phrases are juxtaposed in symphonic harmonies of language that create emotional highs and lows to express the paradoxes of vision and a move towards a sense of inner harmony… Perry therefore finds imagery in the breakthroughs of biology and physics to explore the human capacity for conflict and denial.

This selection of Perry's poems from her nine titles of approximately 650 poems should place her firmly into the canon of Australian poetry.

• Red Scarf (1963)
• Frozen Section (1967)
• Two Houses (1969)
• Black Swans at Berrima (1972)
• Berrima Winter (1974)
• Journal of a Surgeon's Wife (1976)
• Journal of a Surgeon's Wife (sequence)
• Snow in Summer (1980)
• Be Kind to Animals (1984)