Of Barbara Helfgott Hyett's work, columnists and reviewers have said:

"Hyett's Atlantic City (Natural Law)comes clamoring back in these deeply rooted poems. Her loyalties and losses become ours, bursting their colors across the rented walls of our childhood.'" And in praise for The Tracks We Leave: "Hyett marries fact to lyric….Hers is an original conception, one I confess I view with envy."
- Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize winning poet

For Natural Law: "Rich with experience, with the kind of poignant wisdom gentle reflection on experience brings, these are very various poems, sometimes calm, sometimes boisterous, often touching, but always delicate and morally generous." About In Evidence: "...stark as the stark realities it confronts, as brutally honest as the brutal universe it evokes. The 'liberation' its poems describe was a liberation only for a fighting few sad survivors. For the dead, and for the rest of humanity, it was a condemnation of the soul from which in some ways we shall never recover. This is a valuable and unfortunately a necessary work." Of The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus: "This book is a genuine contribution to the literature on Columbus and exploration, and a welcome widening of the sometimes rather cramped visions and ambitions of contemporary poetry."
- C.K. Williams, Poet and National Book Award winner

"There is a breathlessness, a lyric eroticism in these lines. One feels that the passion that fueled Columbus has entered the poet." - Ruth Whitman, Sojourner

Booklist (June 15, 1986) writes of In Evidence: "The very 'unliterariness' of these lines only heightens their effect. Of several recent poetry volumes devoted to the Holocaust, this is by far the most worthy as history."

"Hyett gives Columbus buffs and general readers a way into the mind and heart of the explorer. Her descriptions of the minutiae of the sailors' lives is compelling and realistic… This reader felt as if she were on the ship."
- Judith Hemschemeyer, poet and translator of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

"There is probably no better memorial to Columbus than Hyett's beautiful poetry. She has gone beyond the admiral's formal journal entries and captured not only his soul but the spirit of the enterprise."
- Robert H. Fulson, author of The Log of Christopher Columbus

"Wonderful poetry, haunting and evocative - a reminder to us all that wilderness in its aesthetic splendor is vanishing."
- Thomas Eisner, Schuman Professor of Chemical Ecology, Cornell University, and chairman, Endangered Species Coalition.