"Behind the Actual: Peter Cowan's The Tins'," in Westerly, No. 3, September, 1973, pp. 39-41.

In the following excerpt, Williams compares Cowan's early short fiction to his more recent collection The Tins, focusing on the author's changed treatment of such familiar themes as loneliness and isolation in this work.

All the commentary on Peter Cowan's work makes him out a realist like the Ibsen of the 'social' plays. Cowan is said to be a recorder of certain depleted lives, whose stories extend understanding and compassion to the voiceless. The work is like this, but there is more to say. Myself I am guided by the feeling expressed by Eluard about the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

For me, this vision is always accompanied by a feeling of cold, as if I had been touched by a winter wind from a distant country.

The new collection of Cowan's stories, even more...