The Grasscutters is a book that pays attention—to landscape, to people, to other creatures, to what has happened or is happening within her own head. The result is an unlaboured originality—an originality which is not born of a straining to be different, but which is a necessary consequence of the witnessing and reporting of particular phenomena by a sensitive and idiosyncratic intelligence. 
 
Judith Beveridge has said "I’d rather read Jo Gardiner’s poetry than just about anyone’s because of her verbal finesse, because language in her hands has the jolting effect of a sudden wave, the heady perfume of gardenia, a sky of shooting stars."
 
The result is that time and time again we find something that we thought familiar transfigured into something stranger, fresher and more full of meaning. By repeating this small miracle throughout the book, Gardiner re-enchants the world.