Fourteen Men

Fourteen Men : Verses (1954) is a collection of poetry by Australian poet Mary Gilmore.

She writes not of the past (which she could well do remembering her colourful career) but of modern aspects of this disenchanted age — aeroplanes radar and atom bombs."

[3] A. D. Hope was rather more analytical in his review in The Sydney Morning Herald: "Apart from the patriotic and the war poems, Fourteen Men seems to me in some ways Mary Gilmore's best.

There are better poems in the volume of selected verse published in 1948, but in this volume there is concentration, a distillation, and clarification of the essence, less of the trivial and occasional, and a plain note of vision which is, perhaps, the effect of the clairvoyance that comes from looking back on things long done with but not abandoned, loved but no longer possessed.

It is this sense of clairvoyance which is the strongest impression the book leaves, as her mind moves back in quest and excitement over the events and people of her youth, the sights and creatures of the country in New South Wales and the lives of the aborigines whom she knew as a child.