Picnic is probably Fay Zwicky’s most confident collection. In it she renounces certain kinds of brilliance for a freer and more open style of poetry – what she calls in one poem ‘the grace of candour’. It is a style that approximates moral qualities: honesty, direct ness, kindness to strangers. And it is in fact such moral qualities that give force to this collection. Take the title poem, which starts: ‘On a green sweep of Kings Park grass / dappled with late summer shadow / I joined a picnic with Afghani refugees …’ From this anecdotal beginning, Zwicky works a meditation on what it means to be an outsider: