SOURCE: Zwicky, Fay. “The Prophetic Voice.” In The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival, 1974-1984, pp. 246-52. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1986.

In the following review of A Late Picking, Zwicky discusses Hope's reputation as a poet in Australia and elucidates the central themes in his verse.

The man alone digging his bones a hole; The pyramid in the waste—whose images? 

When A. D. Hope asked this question in ‘Pyramis or The House of Ascent’ in 1948, he was trying to reconcile the ambiguity of the creative consciousness in the image of the Egyptian Pharaoh: the artist/priest snagged in tension between the heart's passions and that clear-sighted perception of illusion which cuts him off from other human beings. In this early poem the artist's work becomes a monument to his self-assertion in a spiritual wasteland, and there was some admiration implied for ‘those...