 The "Cambridge Guide to Literature in English" describes her style as "densely textured but elegant and direct".Zwicky's first collection, "Isaac Babel's Fiddle" (1975) included a number of poems about her Lithuanian grandfather and his cultural displacement in Australia, which nevertheless saved him from the Holocaust ("Summer Pogrom", "Totem and Taboo").Zwicky also writes of her own alienation, in spite of her being "whiter than Persil".