Lilian Mohin identified ‘the primary quality’ of the poems she selected for One Foot on the Mountain as ‘one of redefinition […] contributions to the long task of renaming the world and our place in it’ (Mohin, 1979, 5). But the landscapes of this poetry are predominantly interior, whether in the speaker's mind or in a room. When ‘the world’ does appear, it is usually either urban, derelict and/or deserted and threatening or it is conceptualised, as in Mary Woodward's journey in her poem ‘summer of 76, spent working in Barnet Hospital but still going to a woman's group in Clapham’: ‘towards / the evening and its/politics’ (Mohin, 1979, 181). Many of the poems that Mohin collects converge with the capitalised title of Stef Pixner's poem ‘THAT WORLD THROUGH THE WINDOW IS A BAREFACED LIE’ (Mohin, 1979, 224). Such a view – ‘through the window’ – begs a double question: what can a non-mainstream women's poetry write when it looks outward? And is a confessional, broadly lyric mode sufficient for ‘the long task of renaming’? Thomas Butler also notes that Pixner's poem raises a question with which both feminist and women experimental poets have struggled: if the world is a lie – that is, a discourse that is injurious to the truth of the self – where is the subject to locate herself? (Butler, 2005, 197–98) However, the answer is not a simple choice between isolation and interiority or recognition that the world's ‘barefaced lie’ is the self's originary ground. The overwhelming sense of Mohin's anthology is of poems shifting about in these two equally uneasy options, trying not to surrender to either and attempting to create a more satisfactory or valid position.

The attempt to create something else is crucial for ‘the long task of renaming the world and our place in it’. The difficulties involved in shifting about within uneasy options are nicely caught by Mary Woodward: ‘the train slipping / through the London / names as the day moves // away’ (Mohin, 1979, 181). The world (specifically the city, where most contemporary poets live) is a place of ‘names’, while our lived experience of it (‘the day’) seems to elude language and the making of poetry.