SOURCE: "Exploring 'The Secret Caves of Language': Janet Frame's Poetry," in Meanjin, Vol. 44, No. 3, September, 1985, pp. 384-90.

In the following essay, Mercer examines Frame's poetry in The Pocket Mirror as well as the more poetic passages of her novels, finding both to be "innovative and engrossing."

When she was sixteen, Janet Frame wrote in her diary, 'Dear Mr Ardenue, they think I'm going to be a schoolteacher, but I'm going to be a poet'. She has become a poet, but she is still beset by the problem of a 'they' who think she is, or ought to be, something else.

Janet Frame is repeatedly referred to as a 'novelist'. This, despite the fact that ten of her twenty published books are not novels, but volumes of short fiction, poetry, autobiography and children's fiction. Of the ten remaining books, Frame calls only one a 'novel', to explicitly distinguish it...