In the original dustsheet. Red cloth binding with black title on the spine.

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Marianne Moore said that the poet’s job was to depict “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. In truth, gardens are always imaginary because they are always the garden that you are aiming for rather than the garden you have, but the toads are real and immediate.’ So says Germaine Greer in this wonderful anthology. A collection of poems culled from all periods, ranging from Roman to Mediaeval poetry, and including the best known paean, Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, Tennyson’s comic ‘Amphion’, and Donne’s meditations on individual flowers, herbs and trees, this is a book of beautiful texts and intriguing information that can be read along with the seed catalogues in the dead of winter, or in the gaps between tasks on a busy day in spring, or between snoozes in the hammock in the deep midsummer.

Reviews

• a beautifully produced and evocative collection ― Rosemary Goring, HERALD

• Poems about gardens and gardening from around the world and across time, collected by the writer, critic and gardener, Germaine Greer.

• It is nice to have a book of poems on a theme to see how different poets use this theme

• A light-hearted and witty but scholarly approach

The Author,Dr Germaine Greer first came to international attention thirty years ago with the publication of The Female Eunuch. She is Professor of English at Warwick University and a respected columnist and cultural commentator. She lives in Essex.

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Specializing in English and women’s literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England.

Greer’s ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, it offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women were forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfil male fantasies of what being a woman entailed.

Greer’s subsequent work has focused on literature, feminism and the environment. She has written over 20 books, including Sex and Destiny (1984), The Change (1991), The Whole Woman (1999), and The Boy (2003). Her 2013 book, White Beech: The Rainforest Years, describes her efforts to restore an area of rainforest in the Numinbah Valley in Australia. In addition to her academic work and activism, she has been a prolific columnist for The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Independent, and The Oldie, among others.

Greer is a liberation (or radical) rather than equality feminist. Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and “agreeing to live the lives of unfree men”. “Women’s liberation”, she wrote in The Whole Woman (1999), “did not see the female’s potential in terms of the male’s actual.” She argues instead that liberation is about asserting difference and “insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination”. It is a struggle for the freedom of women to “define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate”.