Garrigue did not belong to a poetic school or movement, and asserted intellectual, artistic, and emotional independence throughout her life. Theodore Roethke said that she trusted her own poetic instincts more than any poet he knew. Laurence Lieberman has said that "There are rewards to be secured in reading her best poems of a kind that can be found in no other body of work." Those rewards include lyricism and technical brilliance, richness in the service of clarity. Harvey Shapiro wrote that "Her way with language was Mozartean, breathtaking in its ability to ring change after change on a theme, Mozartean bursts of language, never leaving the subject, enabling the eye to see, clearly and more clearly, while delighting the ear with sound." Her poetic landscape is romantic, and her strategies are multiple. Garrigue was by nature a formal poet and used a wide range of traditional forms, borrowing from the metaphysicals and modernists alike. Her characteristic subjects are love and its discontents, the process of vision, morality and generosity, desire, feeling, and the imaginative power of women.