The Glacier's Daughter is the winner of the 1981 Juniper Prize, an annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press. Arising from an enormous feeling for and an acute perception of nature, the poems in this collection are distinguished by unexpected imagery, unique arrangements of language, and the facility with which the natural and human worlds are described and transformed by daring new perceptions. Hopes's poems are imbued with the intensely felt religious experience that colors his writing, about both nature and other parts of his life. He sees his poetry, in part, as an attempt to "reverse Milton's activity and justify the ways of men to God."
