The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets

The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets is an anthology of poems by Australian women poets edited by Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn, published by Penguin Books in 1986.^[1]

The anthology contains 212 poems from 89 authors.^[2]

After lamenting the lack of women poets in a number of then-contemporary Australian poetry anthologies Helen Thompson in Australian Book Review noted that this anthology "flings down the gauntlet, as it were, with a gender-specific survey, challenging categorisation based on genre or theme." She went on to comment that "gender-specific collections of writing such as this one does make possible a contrasting ‘centring’ of female experience which demands assessment on its own terms."^[3]

Reviewing the anthology for The Age Literary Review Anne Diamond stated: "The collection's feminist challenge to the male dominance in Australian poetry lies in the diversity of its own vested interests; the acknowledged plurality of feminism represented by the differing positions of migrant, Aboriginal, lesbian and colonial women in Australian history. Although this is the anthology's strongest feature it is also a necessary compromise; in one sense, the book attempts a politics of plurivocality with the basic empirical assumptions of the anthology form itself."^[4]

The Oxford Literary History of Australia said, of the anthology, that the editors' "focus was on poetry as well as on politics, and the work is of a high standard, with a particular emphasis, perhaps reflecting the editors' own taste, on satire."^[5]

The Cambridge History of Australian Literature called this anthology a landmark "in the affirmation of a collective notion of women's poetry in Australia."^[6]

• 1986 in Australian literature