Valence is a powerful book on a number of levels. It contains a powerful anti-war poem, rich in imagery and history, full of passion and measured anger. It also operates on a more direct level, directly confronting the culture, language and history of war. In the end it doesn’t fit well in Auden’s poetic valley – it is a work that demands to be widely read. Perhaps it should be compulsory reading in the period leading up to the 100^th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.

But oh, “undoing hatred is a pilgrimage of hurt . . .” oh yes, and this is what a lifetime of feminism is all about finally, going out to the edge and finding your sisters there. Thank you so very much for this profound work.

... Hawthorne’s voice is clear, striking, impassioned... As it works its way through its variations on war the sequence moves inevitably towards despair. In the last lines: ‘you dream of light . . . /you sob . . . / because nothing will ‘stop the clot of war’. It’s a hard note to end on. Honest – and hard.

Valence: Considering War through Poetry and Theory is a powerful rage against the brutality and greed of war; against the particular suffering of women in war; against our indifference but more importantly, our sense of powerlessness in the face of wars most of us neither support nor would ever instigate. Susan Hawthorne’s primary companion to this rage is her grief. Here is a poet of moral conscience, in the fine tradition of Adrienne Rich, a poet writing across boundaries; striving with each form to elucidate, illuminate, change.