Many of the poems in First Things Last … seem overwrought, as if Malouf were struggling to find forms in which to embody his lyricism. There is often a laboured quality to the rhetoric. 'Reading a View' is typical in this respect….

Most of the First Things Last poems deal with only those aspects of human life that reflect the natural world. A constant stream of intricate metaphor runs through this poetry, with an occasional triumph of the literal. This juxtaposition of the abstractly rhetorical with the sharply delineated detail gives the better poems their edge….

['The Crab Feast'] is a ten-page work in which the speaker digs away at what seems common to his own life and that of the crab. I find it a self-conscious poem, factitious in places. The opening, for instance, applies conventional sexual metaphors to the reality of the speaker's eating the crab. But...