David Malouf is a … mature poet, and … [an] accessible one; his long looping sentences twining over their line-endings need to be followed carefully, but he is no exhibitionist: the techniques he has learnt are subordinated to the poems themselves. He has a strong visual consciousness with a sense of joyful absorption in the natural world which makes the overworked word "celebration" irresistible. The first poem in [First Things Last] is about lemon trees gone wild, and the second about a garden: the image of Eden recurs throughout the book, as garden or as wilderness or as landscape remembered from the past (in a fine long poem, "Deception Bay", he reconstructs the surroundings of his childhood by a series of conscious acts of will shared with his readers)….

One of Malouf's concerns is with the relations between reality and seeming…. Another preoccupation is time, the interfusion of the present...