[In Giving Back Diamonds] Bowering does give diamonds back, moulded from the coal of her experience…. Bowering's lines are honed, her words deliberately and deceptively simple. Like her West-Coast colleague Susan Musgrave, Bowering is fascinated by elemental things—bones, blood, the pull of the grave—but she prefers a finesse where Musgrave would go for the grand slam. Bowering writes elliptically, sparely, from a sensibility that might serve as a model for the younger woman poet, both delicate and tough….

The poems indeed have a logic of their own, mirroring and amplifying each part and then ringing changes before the echo sours. The best ones have the impact of a dream or fairy tale….

Occasionally she removes a bit too much of the connective tissue between idea and image, making the poem difficult for the reader to explore: the two serial poems "Mary Shelley" and "Sea Changes" suffer...