[Using his review of The Other Half (1966) as an occasion to write a retrospective of Wright's career, Ewers traces her development from regionalist to universalist, and concludes that she is a mystic with a poetic voice.]

Before attempting to come to terms with Judith Wright's latest volume, The Other Half, I propose, first to take a brief sampling of what critics and reviewers had to say about her earlier work as it appeared, and then to examine it in more detail as a whole. This will enable us to establish her poetic background, to mark some common factors to be found in all her poetry and the differences that emerge from time to time.

Much credit is due to C. B. Christesen, editor of Meanjin in which a number of her poems had already appeared, for publishing her first book, The Moving Image (1946). This brought nothing but praise from the critics. Professor S. Musgrove said [in Southerly 8, No. 3 (1947)]: "This book confirms what we have for some time suspected from Judith Wright's periodical pieces, that she is the only poet among the younger Australians who can challenge the stature of R. D. FitzGerald." Nan McDonald, herself a poet, wrote: "After wading through many books of verse where only a faint glimmer of poetry haunts the bog of words, the reader can ask nothing better than to be dealt the old familiar blow that says, beyond all shadow of doubt, 'This is poetry'. Judith Wright's first book, The Moving Image, does that." Woman to Man (1949) was no less enthusiastically received. By the time H. M. Green had published the second edition of his anthology, Modern Australian Poetry, in 1952, he was prepared on the evidence of these two volumes alone to place her "among the principal poets writing in English today". Still confining himself to these two books, Green amplified this further in his A History of Australian Literature, Vol. 2, 1923–1950: "A couple of lines that certainly and several whole poems that probably belong to world literature; half a dozen poems that are among the best of their kind in the present day: it is an amazing production for a woman of thirty-five, and it fixes Judith Wright's position, alongside those of FitzGerald and Slessor, among the first of living poets, in Australia or elsewhere."

There was less enthusiasm for the third volume, The Gateway (1953). Elyne Mitchell [in Southerly 16, No. 1 (1955)] regretted that the language and the imagery were "similar to those recording the spiritual journeys of other poets", and T. Inglis Moore [in Meanjin 17, No. 3 (1958)] found "a relaxing of the high tension, a recurring sense of uncertainty, a feeling that the poet has stopped on her path to look around, unsure of her way". About the fourth volume, The Two Fires (1955) the critics themselves were divided. Someone writing in Southerly, No. 2, 1956, with the initials of J. T. declared that many poems "lend colour to a suspicion that the author is forcing her art". He even went so far as to suggest that "half-baked critics or importunate publishers may have hurried this fine poet into putting out a fourth book before she was ready to do so". But Robert D. FitzGerald (who is certainly no "half-baked critic") after commenting on the changing direction shown in this new volume, said "the earlier impressions return of poetry that has almost everything we could ask of it", adding later that "one is continuously conscious of a power of vision beyond the ordinary sight of mankind" [Meanjin 15, No. 2 (1956)]. In the final chapter of his History already referred to—a chapter bringing the record up to 1960—H. M. Green amended his previously expressed opinion that Judith Wright was "essentially lyrist rather than intellectual". This he said, no longer held, for her third and fourth books showed her "moving inward, less often making her vision concrete and lyrical with pictures and lovely images and more often realizing some inner experience". He conceded that this showed "her poetic attitude is not static, an important thing for a writer who has already made so high a place for herself.

Judith Wright's fifth volume was Birds (1962). F. H. Mares in The Australian Book Review [Vol. 2, No. 6] said: "These are beautifully wrought small poems: I had hoped for a great deal more, and I fear a withdrawal here." There is a tendency, it seems, for the contemporary reviewer to anticipate what the writer may do next and to be disappointed when his own anticipation is not fulfilled. It was timely therefore that these five volumes should be followed by two selections, each made by the poet herself, so that we could get the flavour of her work as a whole up to that point. The first of these was in Angus & Robertson's Australian Poets series and appeared in 1963, to be followed by a rather fuller selection, Five Senses, in 1964. Both contained some poems under the heading of "The Forest" not previously published in book form, of which more will be said presently.

This then was the position as far as some critics and reviewers saw it up to the publication of her latest volume of new work, The Other Half. It was clear that all were agreed that Judith Wright was a poet of considerable statute, but not all were prepared to concede that her genius had not sometimes faltered in her six published volumes (seven, if we count "The Forest" poems which occur for the first time in the two volumes of selections).

I have now spent some weeks reading at leisure Judith Wright's entire published poems in an attempt to distil from them some unifying essence. When met again after many years, a number of poems in her early volumes assumed, for me, the classic quality of memorableness. What I wish to convey by this is that apparently these poems had at earlier readings entered into my subconscious to a degree I had not realized. Others familiar with this author's work, attempting a similar exercise in re-acquaintance, would no doubt share this experience and be prepared to name further poems which produced a similar effect on them. Among those which came to me in the rereading with the force and familiarity of old and well-tried companions were "Nigger's Leap: New England", "Bullocky" and "South of my Days" from the first volume, "Woman to Man", "Woman's Song", "Woman to Child" and "Lost Child" from the second, "Birds" "Old House" from the third, and the title poem from the fourth. There were others where the impact of familiarity was also present but to a lesser degree. This is a very subjective approach and mere memorableness for any individual is not necessarily a virtue. When it is coupled with the undoubted quality which such poems possess and when it is shared with a great number of other readers—as I believe is true of Judith Wright's work—it means a great deal.

One of the strongest impressions I received was the relationship much of her work bears to the time it was written. This can be a disadvantage; it can make for ephemeral work if the poet is too closely a victim of her time. But Judith Wright manages to transcend the ephemeral where many a lesser poet has been engulfed by it. This is well illustrated by the mood of most of the poems in The Moving Image. This was published in 1946, but all the poems except one are grouped under the heading: Poems, 1940–1944; that is, they were written during World War II. The title poem is undated, but it could be regarded as a war-poem with its overtones of destruction, although it is much more than that in its full implications.

World War II was a time when Australia's survival as a nation in the Pacific received its first full challenge and this evoked a great deal of inward-looking. We might not last long, the time seemed to say. What are we? How far have we come? The year before the outbreak of war had seen the announcement of the Jindyworobak manifesto by Rex Ingamells who gathered around him a group of nationalistic poets whose talents (many of them limited) drew also upon this inward-looking fostered by the threat to survival. Writers in this group over-stressed background and local colour, and aroused a good deal of hostility in certain quarters. Judith Wright was never close to the movement, but when asked by its founder to contribute to a review of its achievements at the end of 10 years she offered a comment that was untouched by the rancour that coloured the criticisms of many others.

"The Russian, the English, the Norwegian writer can concentrate his attention on the social or psychological problem in hand; his background is already filled in, taken for granted" she wrote in an article called Perspective [in Jindyworobak Review (1948)]. "But the Australian background, important as it is to the Australian psychology, has never thus been assimilated. So a kind of split in the writer's consciousness is often manifest; he cannot solve his immediate problem, he cannot keep attention concentrated on his foreground, while his background keeps intruding. Perhaps this duality, this unsolved problem, is partly the cause of the gaps in Australian literature, and the curious lack of writers with anything like a 'body of work' to their credit. Only the single-minded with a track of their own to follow, or the genuinely great writer, can bypass that boulder in the road. (Henry Handel Richardson managed it in the Mahony trilogy, Slessor and FitzGerald managed it, though neither of them can be called prolific writers; Hugh McCrae and his circle managed it by simply detaching themselves completely from the ground and flying over it, but nevertheless their work as a whole was seriously weakened by the evasion.)

"It seems to me that the Jindy movement was essentially an effort to get the problem into perspective. I don't necessarily mean that the Jindy writers themselves have done that, but rather that in the ensuing argument the issues found some kind of clarification; and in fact the work of the outstanding Jindy writers has to some extent already broken the problem down. To emphasize our regionalism instead of trying to elude it—this has had a value in itself, and it has performed the further function of leading to a reaction against itself. That is to say, that having found out what happens when one tries to treat the problem as an end in itself, it is now possible to apply the knowledge. The regional, the national outlook has a value, and no doubt some writers do their best work within such a closed circuit. But there are other jobs to do; and Jindyworobak has probably contributed something towards finding the means to do them. It may be that because of the Jindy movement, even those most fiercely opposed or most indifferent to it know themselves a little better."

The italics at the end are mine. Whether, in fact, Judith Wright herself was opposed or indifferent to the Jindyworobak attitude is not clear, but her poetry in this first volume stands in sharp contrast to that of the bulk of Jindyworobak verse in that, while sometimes saying the same thing, it says it from much greater depth. Reg Ingamells had written in his first book of verse published ten years earlier:

It's a pleasant enough concept and here put forward probably for the first time, but it is shallow and poetically not distinguished. Judith Wright in "Nigger's Leap: New England" puts a similar thought into much richer language:

Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,
and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?

She follows this with an extension of thought to the oneness of man, an extension, it may be added, which seldom if ever entered into the verse of the Jindyworobaks:

O all men are one man at last. We should have known
the night that tided up the cliffs and hid them
had the same question on its tongue for us.
And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.

Her main preoccupation in this first volume is with what we have grown out of; it derives from the inward-looking that was part of the time in which she was writing. It occurs over and over again. In "Country Town" she says:

This is no longer the landscape that they knew,
the sad green enemy country of their exile,
those branded men whose songs were of rebellion.
…. .

This is a landscape that the town creeps over;
a landscape safe with bitumen and banks.
The hostile hills are netted in with fences
and the roads lead to houses and the pictures.
Thunderbolt was killed by Constable Walker
long ago; the bones are buried, the story printed.
And yet in the night of the sleeping town, the voices:
This is not ours, not ours the flowering tree.
What is it we have lost and left behind?

Where the Jindyworobaks were accusing early settlers of despoiling the countryside, thundering imprecations about "the rape of the land", Judith Wright was enquiring into the sources from which she herself had sprung. The poem concludes with a call to

Remember Thunderbolt, buried under the air-raid trenches.
Remember the bearded men singing of exile.
Remember the shepherds under their strange stars.

That this call for remembrance is, for her, very personal is shown in many places and nowhere better than in "South of my Days" which begins:

South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country,
rises the tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite—
clean, lean, hungry country….

and ends:

If there has been despoilment, this seems to imply, then we are all touched with some guilt and out of the original hate-love relationship between our forebears and this alien earth has come the fulfilment of love.

Her poem, "Bullocky", expressed in a ballad-like form she was not often to use again, became at once a favourite anthology piece. The first three stanzas suffice to show its mood:

Beside his heavy-shouldered team,
thirsty with drought and chilled with rain,
he weathered all the striding years
till they ran widdershins in his brain:

Till the long solitary tracks
etched deeper with each lurching load
were populous before his eyes,
and fiends and angels used his road.

All the long straining journey grew
a mad apocalyptic dream,
and he old Moses, and the slaves
his suffering and stubborn team.

This is landscape poetry, but it is a landscape with people. In "South of my Days" there was old Dan:

Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones.
Seventy summers are hived in him like old honey.

In "Brother and Sisters" there are Millie, Lucy and John struggling against time and lack of fulfilment on a no-good farm:

The road turned out to be a cul-de-sac;
stopped like a lost intention at the gate
and never crossed the mountains to the coast.
But they stayed on.

"Half-caste Girl" is pure Jindyworobak, but written with much deeper insight:

Little Josie buried under the bright moon
is tired of being dead, death lasts too long.
She would like to push death aside, and stand on the hill
and beat with a waddy on the bright moon like a gong.

Across the hills, the hills that belong to no people
and so to none are foreign,
once she climbed high to find the native cherry;
the lithe darkhearted lubra
who in her beads like blood
dressed delicately for love
moves her long hands among the strings of the wind,
singing the songs of women,
the songs of love and dying.

Most of the poetry in The Moving Image is essentially regional; its appeal could be largely to those who, however vicariously, have shared the emotions which regionalism of any sort calls up. We are reminded of her words in the Jindyworobak review: "The regional, the national outlook has a value, and no doubt some writers do their best work within such a closed circuit. But there are other jobs to do." Judith Wright worked magnificently within that closed circuit, but did not confine herself to it. Even in this early volume "The Company of Lovers" entirely forsakes regionalism. It does, however, remain a poem of its time, the time of a world at war:

We meet and part now over all the world;
we, the lost company,
take hands together in the night, forget
the night in our brief happiness, silently.
We, who sought many things, throw all away
for this one thing, one only,

remembering that in the narrow grave
we shall be lonely.

Death marshals up his armies round us now.
Their footsteps crowd too near.
Lock your warm hands above the chilling heart
and for a time I live without my fear.
Grope in the night to find me and embrace
for the dark preludes of the drums begin,
and round us, round the company of lovers,
death draws his cordons in.

This poem serves to introduce us to the prevailing mood of her second volume, Woman to Man. Love is a recurring theme in these and later poems. At first it begins as the love between man and woman; later it takes on a more transcendental quality—love, the moving force of all life. Just as the landscape poems, wherever they occur in the flow of her poetry, are peopled with personal memories or derivations, so her love poems have a deeply personal quality. It is doubtful whether any aspect of what she says in the title-poem of this volume has ever been better said and a great deal would be lost were it not quoted in full:

The eyeless labourer in the night,
the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
builds for its resurrection day—
silent and swift and deep from sight
foresees the unimagined light.

This is no child with a child's face;
this has no name to name it by:
yet you and I have known it well.
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.

This is the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast,
the precise crystals of our eyes.
This is the blood's wild tree that grows
the intricate and folded rose.

This is the maker and the made;
this is the question and reply;
the blind head butting in the dark,
the blaze of light along the blade.
Oh hold me, for I am afraid.

The two poems which follow this, "Woman's Song" and "Woman to Child", and another later in the book, "The Unborn", are complementary pieces. They serve to establish the fact that the physical "love" of which she writes here, distinct from the more transcendental "love" to be found in many other poems, is always that of the woman. It is the love for the child she is to bear; it is never the passionate love that men feel and write of, never the pursuit and the capture. Nor is it romantic love which is the subject of many poems, most of them by men and some by women aping men. In this respect her attitude towards love is similar to that of Mary Gilmore, although its expression is usually more intense, more poetic. There are other similarities between these two women poets, notably an emotional drawing from the well of the past, an awareness of the significance in our history of the displaced people, the aborigines (although here Mary Gilmore's poetry is far more emotive) and a strong sense of common humanity. But there are sharp differences, too. Both are feminine, but Mary Gilmore is sometimes also feminist, a characteristic never to be found in Judith Wright's work or her personal attitudes. Nor does she espouse causes or champion the underdog. And nothing could be more out of character than to imagine Miss Wright rushing off to join a socialist colony in Paraguay or anywhere else!

Many poems in this second volume make reference to children: "Child in Wattle Tree", "The Child", "The World and the Child", "Night and the Child". All these are to some degree the result of an intense awareness of the impingement of age upon youth, part of the duality which is stressed in many other ways in other poems: light and dark, real and unreal, life and death. In "Lost Child", a section of the closing sequence of poems in this book, she gives a hint of the metaphysical realms she is to explore more frequently and at considerable depth in later volumes:

Is the boy lost? Then I know where he is gone.
He has gone climbing the terrible crags of the Sun.

The searchers go through the green valley, shouting his name;
the dogs are moaning on the hill for the scent of his track;
but the men will all be hoarse and the dogs lame
before the Hamilton's boy is found or comes back.
Through the smouldering ice of the moon he is stumbling alone.
I shall rise from my dark and follow where he is gone.

I heard from my bed his bugle breath go by
and the drum of his heart in the measure of an old song.
I shall travel into silence, and in that fierce country
When we meet he will know he has been away too long.
They are looking for him now in the vine-scrub over the hill,
but I think he is alone in a place that I know well.

Is the boy lost? Then I know where he is gone.
He is climbing to Paradise up a river of stars and stone.

It may have been because the contemporary critics expected some blending of the regionalism of her first volume and the various interpretations of love that coloured her second that they paused uncertainly before the third. Its significance seems to be crystallized in four lines from the title-poem, which is placed right at the very end of the book:

In the land of oblivion
among the black-mouthed ghosts,

I knew my Self
the sole reality.

Henceforth and in many different ways, the poet is to embark upon a voyage of discovery in Self, a Self that is not merely of this time but in all time. There are hints of a growing wonder at the miracle of life and of the lifegiving force, love. This is the theme of the opening poem, "Dark Gift", in which the poet marvels at the growth of a flower that "begins in the dark where life is not" until with the calyx folded she cries:

Open, green hand, and give
the dark gift you hold.

Oh wild mysterious gold!
Oh act of passionate love!

There is also a growing preoccupation here with the receding of youth, with the approach of age, although she is still only in her late thirties. Often she re-states with no less force and vision the regionalism of the best poems in The Moving Image. Thus we have "Eroded Hills", "Drought", "Unknown Water", "The Ancestors" and most memorably "Old House", which begins:

Where now outside the weary house the pepperina,
that great broken tree, gropes with its blind hands
and sings a moment in the magpie's voice, there he stood once,
that redhaired man my great-great-grand-father,
his long face amiable as an animal's,
and thought of vines and horses.
He moved in that mindless country like a red ant,
running tireless in the summer heat among the trees—
the nameless trees, the sleeping soil, the original river—
and said that the eastern slope would do for a vineyard.

It was no doubt the diversity of subjects dealt with in this third volume which aroused some misgivings in the minds of contemporary critics, which caused T. Inglis Moore to feel that "the poet has stopped on her path to look around, unsure of her way". But one cannot share Elyne Mitchell's regret that often her language and imagery were "similar to those recording the spiritual journeys of other poets". What different language or imagery could possibly be desirable for "Birds", one of her most profound poems?

Whatever the bird is, is perfect for the bird.
Weapon kestrel hard as a blade's curve,
thrush round as a mother or a full drop of water
fruit-green parrot wise in his shrieking swerve—
all are what bird is and do not reach beyond bird.

Must we deny the validity of "weapon kestrel", "blade's curve", "round as a mother or a full drop of water?" One wonders whether this poem arose out of the fragmentary thought in R. D. FitzGerald's Essay on Memory: that sometimes one sees "the bird's flight as the bird". Judith Wright is here emphasizing the apparent simplicity of motives guiding the lives of the "cruel kestrel", the "thrush in the trembling dew beginning to sing", the "parrot clinging and quarrelling and veiling his queer eye". This is contrasted with the complexity of human motives:

But I am torn and beleaguered by my own people.
The blood that feeds my heart is the blood they gave me
and my heart is the house where they gather and fight for dominion—
all different, all with a wish and a will to save me,
to turn me into the ways of other people.

The poem concludes with a yearning to

…. melt the past, the present and the future in one
and find the words that lie behind all these languages.
Then I could fuse my passions into one clear
stone and be simple to myself as the bird is to the bird.

If the imagery lacks the sharp Australianism that characterized her more regional poetry, it is because she has moved out of regionalism into the universal. Her future work is to move more and more in that direction, yet in a subtle way its universal aspects are involved in the regional. Thus in her fourth book, The Two Fires, we have "The Wattle Tree" with its opening lines:

The tree knows four truths—
earth, water, air, and fire of the sun.
The tree holds four truths in one.
Root, limb and leaf unfold
out of the seed, and these rejoice
till the tree dreams it has a voice
to join four truths in one great word of gold.

It could be any tree—oak, elm, cedar or what you will. But it is a wattle tree; the last line tells us that. Here, too, is emerging a theme that is to recur more and more frequently in her work—the kinship with nature, yet an apartness, a separateness from it. Under the bark of a "Scribbly-gum" she finds:

……the written track
of a life I could not read.

However, The Two Fires is once again a book arising out of its time. The poet is very personally concerned with the threat of man's destruction through the possible use of the atom bomb. The title-poem shows this concern in a magnificent poetic conception of the earth born out of fire and returning to fire:

My father rock, do you forget the kingdom of the fire?
The aeons grind you into bread—

into the soil that feeds the living and transforms the dead;
and have we eaten in the heart of the yellow wheat
the sullen unforgetting seed of fire?

And now set free by the climate of man's hate,
that seed sets time ablaze.
The leaves of fallen years, the forest of living days,
have caught like matchwood. Look, the whole world burns.
The ancient kingdom of the fire returns.
And the world, that flower that housed the bridegroom and the bride,
burns on the breast of night.
The world's denied.

Other poems like "The Precipice", "West Wind", "Two Generations", and "Searchlight Practice" also develop this concept. They contain lines that stamp her as a poet of the highest possible artistry and sensitivity, lines that cause the reader to pause and marvel when he comes upon them. Has the dilemma of our times ever been better stated than in these from "West Wind"?

for to love in a time of hate and to live in a time of death
is lonely and dangerous as the last leaf on the tree
and wrenches the stem of the blood and twists the words from truth.

Her kinship with nature persists in the much slighter poems of her fifth volume, Birds, which were written for her teenage daughter and are therefore less adult in their approach, but are not quite, as Max Harris has said [in The Literature of Australia, ed. by Geoffrey Dutton, 1964], merely the work of a poet who is "keeping her hand in". A lesser poet would have written a very different set of verses for a teenage daughter! Here are some delightful vignettes which, apart from their poetic quality, can only have come from one who has lived close to nature and who has drawn some of her strength from it. Whether it be "that old clever Noah's Ark, the well turned, well-carved pelican with his wise comic eye" or the magpies who "walk with hands in pockets, left and right" and whose song thanks "God with every note" or the chattering Apostle Birds ("How they talked about us!")—there is a great deal of shrewd observation here and more than that, a quality of mystic interpretation which, if the single audience for which they were meant were extended to others of that age, might well awaken an interest in those aspects of the Australian environment which have so moved and influenced the poet herself.

Those who are unfamiliar with the poetry of Judith Wright could not do better than make an approach to her work through Five Senses published in 1964 in Angus & Robertson's Sirius paperback series. Here are most of her truly memorable poems and it is interesting to note that, as if to challenge some of the contemporary critics, she has chosen heavily from The Gateway and Two Fires—the third and fourth volumes which caused some concern at the time because of their apparent departure from what had come to be accepted as typical of this writer. It is particularly interesting because it contains twenty-eight poems hitherto unpublished, under the collective title of "The Forest." These take us a step further along the very personal road of Judith Wright's poetry. They are distinguished by the same certainly of language and techniques we have come to expect. The title-poem of this series, although there are many excellent and diverse poems here, seems to me to crystallize simply and unpretentiously the nature of her quest. I quote it in full:

When first I knew this forest
its flowers were strange.
Their different forms and faces
changed with the seasons' change—

white violets smudged with purple,
the wild-ginger spray,
ground-orchids small and single
haunted my day.

the thick-fleshed Murray-lily,
flame-tree's bright blood,
and where the creek runs shallow,
the cunjevoi's green hood.

When first I knew this forest,
time was to spend,
and time's renewing harvest
could never reach an end.

Now that its vines and flowers
are named and known,
like long-fulfilled desires
those first strange joys are gone.

My search is further.
There's still to name and know
beyond the flowers I gather
that one that does not wither—
the truth from which they grow.

It is a remarkable poem, less complex than many she has written, yet summarizing, I would suggest, her whole poetic endeavour. The vines and flowers, the familiar things of life whether of nature or of man, are named and known. From time to time she will return to them, but not merely to identify or describe. Henceforth the search is further: to "the truth from which they grow". In this single poem we see her moving, as the whole of her poetic work has moved, from the regional to the universal.

And now, at last, having attempted to distil the essence of her writing, let us now look at her latest collection, The Other Half (1966). The concluding piece, "Turning Fifty", reminds us that the poet is now no longer young, no longer the "woman of thirty-five" whose work, on the evidence of two published volumes, H. M. Green found "amazing". At fifty she reviews the times through which she has lived:

Though we've polluted
even this air I breathe
and spoiled green earth;

though, granted life or death,
death's what we're choosing,
and though these years we live
scar flesh and mind,

still, as the sun comes up,
bearing my birthday,
having met time and love
I raise my cup—

dark, bitter, neutral, clean,
sober as morning—
to all I've seen and known—
to this new sun.

Poems written to celebrate one's own birthday are seldom memorable and this is no exception. It is nevertheless impressive in its homely sincerity. This is a coffee cup she is raising, not a convivial glass, and it is clear that she is still possessed by the doubts and fears which were the main theme of The Two Fires. So much profound writing, so much word magic and control, so much that has been accepted as the best of contemporary Australian poetry—all this stems from a woman, now turned fifty, greeting "the new sun" with courage undimmed and, as one knows from what she has already produced, equipped while strength remains with her to continue her quest of ultimate truth.

The themes she has chosen for this latest volume are varied, but there is this recurring note of age, accompanied by a somewhat wistful note of the inevitability of change that age brings. Among the poems in The Forest series was one, "For My Daughter", which reviewed the problem of the woman who is also a mother, her child grown up and going her separate way:

My body gave you then
what was ordained to give,
and did not need my will.
But now we learn to live
apart, what must I do?

"The Curtain", describing the homecoming of a grown child, continues this thought:

So grown you looked, in the same unaltered room,
so much of your childhood you were already forgetting,
while I remembered. Yet in the unforgetting dream
you will come here all your life for renewal and meeting.

It was your breath, so softly rising and falling,
that kept me silent. With your lids like buds unbroken
you watched on their curtain of your life, a stream of shadows moving.
When I touched your shoulder, I too had a little dreamed and woken.

It may be said that Judith Wright, however deeply she feels, however much she is moved by the transience of life or the eternal quest for its underlying truths, will never and can never be dogmatic in her statement. A brief poem, "Wishes", gives her answers to the questions: What do I wish to be? What do I wish to do? To the first she replies, "I wish to be wise". To the second, "I wish to love". The final couplet admits the contradiction:

To love and to be wise?
Down, fool, and lower your eyes.

There are several remarkable poems in this volume. The title-poem is yet another attempt to bring about some reconciliation of opposites which we have noted before. This time the opposites are "the self that night undrowns when I'm asleep" and "my daylight self," the subconscious and the conscious. She brings them tentatively together again in a final couplet:

So we may meet at last, and meeting bless,
And turn into one truth in singleness.

We should perhaps have noted earlier this recurring practice of summing up in a couplet the ideas that the poem has been exploring. In this she is not uniformly successful. There are times when one feels that in her desire to round off a poem as neatly as possible she has yielded a little to rhetoric, a little to emotion. In this couplet I have quoted, one may well wonder whether these two opposites can be reconciled in singleness.

The outstanding poems in The Other Half are "To Hafiz of Shiraz", "Naked Girl and Mirror" and the New Guinea sequence, "The Finding of the Moon". I name these three because of certain intrinsic differences about them, but would not suggest that any others in the volume fall short of the high standard of thought and expression that characterize all Judith Wright's verse. She is, it seems, too fine an artist ever to write a bad poem; if some reach greater heights than others it is because initially they are aimed at greater heights.

"To Hafiz and Shiraz" is prefaced by the statement "the rose has come into the garden, from Nothingness to Being", which reminds us somewhat of an earlier poem, "Dark Gift". Its philosophical theme is the inevitability of fruition, so that it is no longer "any poem" that might follow her pen, but the certainty that in poetry, as in living:

Every path and life leads one way only,
out of continual miracle, through creation's fable,
over and over repeated, but never yet understood,
as every word leads back to the blinding original Word.

"Naked Girl and Mirror" must take its place amongst Judith Wright's finest poems. It is a reflective essay on the problem facing an adolescent girl whose body once served only the elemental needs of childhood, but is now awakening to the fuller needs of maturity and love. This she sees at first as a betrayal and is afraid. She longs to return to what she was but finally realizes that she cannot do this, although she still hopes to retain something of her original self:

In the New Guinea sequence, "The Finding of the Moon", she captures to an extraordinary degree the atmosphere of a tribal village in which a young man, Aruako, turns his back Endymion-like on sensual love in his pursuit of the Moon. It is notable that Miss Wright should depart from her familiar Australian background and that she should with her own poetic vision so successfully enter into this new world. There are some poems here with a quaintly domestic atmosphere that perhaps do not quite do justice to her talents—poems like "To Another Housewife", "Cleaning Day" and "Portrait", but others, although comparatively slight like "The Trap", "A Document" and "Snakeskin on a Gate", show that she has lost nothing of her technical skill or sensitivity. In short, The Other Half is a worthy successor to the volumes that have preceded it. No doubt it will be followed by others if we are to judge from her supplication in the final stanza of "Prayer":

And you, who speak in me when I speak well,
withdraw not now your grace, leave me not dry and cold.
I have praised you in the pain of love, I would praise you still
in the slowing of the blood, the time when I grow old.

What then is the real nature of the genius of Judith Wright? Always she has worked within certain specified limits. Most of her poems are quite short. She has never attempted the epic and has touched only incidentally, through the recalled past, on the heroic. Once or twice she has been tempted towards the slightly satirical ("Eve to her Daughter" in this latest volume is an example), but not very successfully perhaps because this is not fundamentally part of her nature. In the main she has blended the emotions and the intellect, and throughout has developed technical skills which, in spite of attempts by some critics to find influences of Blake and Yeats and T. S. Eliot, have remained peculiarly her own. Not the least of her skills lies in the felicity of her choice of word and phrase and the ability to say a great deal in very few words. Let any who doubt this compare the examples I have given with the language in most other contemporary volumes of Australian poetry.

We have seen how her first two books caused H. M. Green to classify her as a lyricist and how her next two caused him to amend that classification. We have seen how early critics applauded her regional poetry and how some later ones regretted her partial abandonment of the regional for the universal. Throughout a now considerable number of volumes she has established for herself an identity which does not easily fit into any category, but it is clear that she is fundamentally a mystic, seeking through her own personal experiences to find the true significance in all creation of Love and the Word, which in the last analysis are synonymous. That she gives no final answer is not the least of her virtues, since this carries with her a company of readers prepared to go along with her in her quest. There are also many, no doubt, who are less concerned with the quest, but equally prepared to accompany her because of the unique quality of the poetry which she uses to pursue it.