Alan Marshfield"s first major collection brings together poems written over twenty years. As the title implies many of his poems relate, however obliquely, to an idea of the feminine. Male and female polarities set the imaginative field in which he explores tensions between the physical and the metaphysical. His meditations on death and history are especially powerful. "This erudite and inventive poet is someone who has slipped through the net of our reputation makers...he has style and imagination", wrote Peter Porter on his pamphlet "Mistress" (1972)". "The Elektra Poems" confirms this sense of his accomplishment.