[In this excerpt, Walker argues that Wright's collections Fourth Quarter and Phantom Dwelling represent a growth in the poet's already estimable talent and vision. Walker contends that in these books Wright brings a variety of new influences and insights to bear on old themes, answering with clarity questions left open by old poems, and finding peace through reconciliation where once she found conflict.]

The poems of Fourth Quarter represent a break-through into a newer and more vigorous poetic world; an expression of that acceptance which [the poem] "Shadow" anticipated, but which the poems of Alive did not quite achieve. This is one of the most thematically unified of Wright's volumes, for the collection as a whole is a celebration of the feminine principle, of intuition, imagination, love and creativity. The central symbol is the moon in its different phases and various aspects, for the moon controls the ebb and flow of the tide, the mysterious cycles of the feminine, and the "salt blood" of humanity which betrays its marine origin. The sublunary world is the world of physical change and flux, and in these poems Wright reaffirms her earlier commitment to it. Moreover the moon, as muse, inspires the imaginative and creative power of the unconscious which, according to Jung, is feminine in essence. In these poems the emphasis is upon psychic rather than physical creativity, and the source of psychic power, the unconscious, is symbolised by sleep, dream and water. Water and the sea image the source of and the ebb and flow of creativity. All aspects of creativity, such as the vision of Walter Burley Griffin, the architect of Canberra, are related to this generative compulsion. Subsidiary symbolic motifs such as the owl and the hare (creatures traditionally associated with the moon), the platypus, the whale and the termite queen, are brought into play to amplify the conception, and to expand its reverberations out to the furthest horizons of feeling, intuition, meditation, and vision.

In opposition to creativity Wright sets the concept of rationalism, which is symbolised by the daylight world, the land and the active male principle. There is a significant change in Wright's attitude towards evil which is no longer an inherent human characteristic, but a consequence of rationalistic ways of thought. In "White Night" (Alive) she posed a question which has been a constant preoccupation throughout her poetry: "Where does it all begin? / If evil has a beginning / it may disclose its meaning." The poems of Fourth Quarter provide her answer. Here evil is not condoned, but is placed in perspective as the inevitable consequence of that split in the sensibility, the dissociation of thought and feeling … and the denial of human values which this involves. The consequences of rationalism are, once again, taken to their furthest limits. They apply not only to the physical world but to the human mind. The sludge and detritus of modern civilisation has silted up and choked not only the pure streams of the natural world, from Cedar Creek to the Kamo, but the well-springs of the unconscious. Yet nature will not be spoiled, nor will the creative power of the psyche ever be completely suppressed. This is the point of "Platypus" where the platypus is both itself and the elusive poetic impulse which is threatened by the ugly consequences of a polluted world and rationalistic thought:

Platypus, wary paradox,
ancient of beasts,
like a strange word rising
through the waterhole's rocks,

you're gone. That once bright water
won't hold you now.
No quicksilver bubble-trail
in that scummy fetor …

Yet when conditions are right ("At midnight and alone / there's a stir in my mind") the streams run clear, and the paradoxical image, half memory and half symbol, rises up through the "scummy fetor" which threatens to block it:

suddenly my mind
runs clear and you rise through …
platypus, paradox—
like the ripples of your wake.

Within this dialectical framework—the creative feminine principle as opposed to the rationalistic will to power—the keynote of the poetry is acceptance. Wright is no longer interested in philosophical or linguistic rationalisations of inadequacy, for her own shortcomings are freely conceded, placed in perspective, and accepted as simply a reflection of and a parallel to the waning moon and the ebbing tide. The poet accepts her decline, projects herself into the tragi-comic figures of age and sibylline power—the "hag" and "witch" of "Easter Moon and Owl"—and defies the moon's advice to "throw it in", for her response to nature is still powerful, still sensuous.

In the "Interface" sequence, the dualism of human nature, the "schizophrenic imbalance" which has always disturbed Wright, is seen as a logical consequence of evolution. Having left the mother element, water, the human being is now a creature of both the sea (intuition and emotion) and the land (the intellect). The opposition of unconscious and conscious states is symbolised throughout the volume by sleep (or dream) and waking, sea and land. Mist and sea signify a dimension to which the individual has access only in sleep or the dream-life of the imagination:

Dreams: waves. Their wind-meandering changes
reach to the edge of shore, no further.
Their soft admonishing voices
sound from a sea where we can swim no longer.
Now we must wake.

In "Half-dream" the poet, like the old boat, is moored to the land by a fraying rope, drawn by the ebb and flow of the water and the moon-road. The poem also suggests the unity of the mind with the creatures of night and water, and the inevitability of the final drift out towards darkness and death. "Dream" is far more vigorous than "Half-dream"; it suggests that the unconscious expresses the truth of life far more accurately than the waking mind, which deals in comfortable rationalisations. Indeed the individual can have access to truth only in states of dream, intuition and vision, for the evolutionary process has betrayed the human race, "unfinned", to the daytime rational life ashore. Because of its essentially dualistic or amphibian nature, there is no hope for humanity which, according to the poem "By-pass", is now on the highroad which is sweeping it into a world of increasing violence, with the chance for a "U Turn" missed forever. Modern men and women are the products of the age of violent and contending forces which Wright celebrates in "For the Quaternary Age". In this poem, however, Wright not only accepts her dualistic nature, but delights in it:

Part of this acceptance is the acceptance of love. "Eve Sings", a magnificent love lyric, is informed and strengthened by its acceptance of the imperfection of love. The keyword is "human" and its full implications are suggested by the old Edenic symbols: the serpent, the crossed swords, Eden, the tree and a doomed world. Against the full knowledge of guilt, failure and betrayal the poet sets the "greed and joy" of love, for:

In "Eve Scolds" the implications of being "human" are further developed, for the individual woman, Eve and mother earth are identified and opposed to the active, rapacious male principle, "so entrepreneurial, vulgarly moreish, / plunging on and exploring where there's nothing / left to explore, exhausting the last of our flesh". The two impulses—creative (female) and imperialistic (male)—are clearly incompatible:

But you and I, at heart, never got on.
Each of us wants to own—
You, to own me, but even more, the world;
I, to own you.

As always the female impulse is to surrender: "I go over-board for you, / here at the world's last edge. / Ravage us still; the very last green's our kiss." The witty colloquialisms—"I go overboard" and "the world's last edge"—suggest that, because of love, the surrender to male domination is inevitable. Acceptance of this breeds detachment and the poem's irony is light and humorous, in keeping with the title.

Age is more difficult to accept, and the narcissistic young woman in the orchard in "Woman in Orchard" (Eve again?) who "kneels / to love her body in the pool / and dream herself for ever young" confronts instead her alter ego, herself grown old, the witch who "steals / not the flesh but the joy of it". "Moving South", a poem which deals with Wright's move from Mount Tamborine to Braidwood in New South Wales, is more serious and less complex, for moving south, closer to the pole, is a metaphor for divesting oneself of the fleshly extravagance of "summer" existence—an extravagance which is, after all, a cheating enchantment (Beauté de diable)—in order to approach the essence of experience; not only the "root's endurance" which the poet has been stressing throughout her work, but also the waiting winter and death.

In Fourth Quarter Wright returns to old themes with a new vigour and often in a completely new context, always demonstrating control, detachment and a mastery of her material. In "The Dark Ones", for instance, the Aborigines are identified with the dark and potent contents of the unconscious. They rise up like wraiths to reproach the confidence and assurance of the daylight world:

In the town on pension day
mute shadows glide.
The white talk dies away
the faces turn aside.

A shudder like breath caught
runs through the town.
Are they still here? We thought …
Let us alone.

The Aborigines are the shadow side of the self; to deny them is the same as denying a part of the self:

The night ghosts of a land
only by day possessed
come haunting into the mind
like a shadow cast.

Like the Jungian shadow, the Aborigines must be brought up into the consciousness and accepted before the shame and guilt of the white race can be healed. This is a significant and moving poem; quite as powerful as the early "Bora Ring" and "Nigger's Leap, New England", for it relates the immediate racial problem to the deepest levels of the psyche, of feeling and intuition, repressed guilt and shame which, like the "dark ones" of the poem, is denied at our own risk.

"Boundaries" returns to the problem of the relationship between the mind and the world with a new confidence in the ability of the imagination to "first distinguish, then forget distinction; / record the many, then rejoin the all". The imagination is able to see the "whole flow" in the particular, despite the categories of mind (such as language) which insist upon limit, form and time. The imagination can not only re-create the totality from the constituent portion—"I've seen a hat / build under itself a person long since dead"—but, given a stimulus, can create the totality for itself:

That lock of wild bronze hair
that Byron cut from a girl's head
sprang under my touch alive with the whole girl.

The important thing here is that the power of the imagination is affirmed in the face of the limitations which language imposes upon it, and "Boundaries" is an answer to that series of poems which deals with epistemological breakdown resulting from the breakdown of language.

There are in this volume and in Phantom Dwelling a number of poems which appear on first sight to be simply descriptive of nature, examples of that reverence for nature and concern for its uniqueness which the poet has always advocated. These poems are, however, a new departure for, by imitative form and subtle modulations in linguistic texture, the poet captures the visual, tactile and even the kinetic quality of the subject. In this way Wright avoids, as far as possible, the propensity of language and symbolism to humanise nature. Instead she attempts, by imitative form, to capture the individuality of the natural form and so to preserve its autonomy. For instance the long and flexible, broken yet springy rhythms of "The Eucalypt and the National Character" effectively imitate the "sprawling and informal; / even dishevelled, disorderly" landscape:

Ready for any catastrophe, every extreme,
she leaves herself plenty of margin. Nothing is stiff,
symmetrical, indispensable. Everything bends
whip-supple, pivoting, loose …

In "Case-moth", too, the texture of the language captures the visual form, the movement and the life-quality of this particular organism:

Homespun, homewoven pod,
case-moth wears a clever web.
Sloth-grey, slug-slow,
slung safe in a sad-coloured sack,
a twig-camouflaged bedsock,
shifts from leaf to next leaf;
lips life at a bag mouth.

"Swamp Plant" and "Encounter" are similarly impressive. At the same time these poems achieve Ponge's "invasion of qualities". "Case-moth", for instance, conveys the tenacity of life and the cautious subterfuges required for survival, and suggests that such caution stunts the life of the moth ("Inside, your wings wither") and, by extension to the human sphere, the life of the imagination. The termite queen too is seen on a naturalistic level, yet becomes a superb indigenous symbol for the generative feminine principle, in this way tying the poem to the central theme of the volume:

She is nursery, granary, industry,
army and agriculture.
Her swollen motionless tissues
rule every tentacle.

The predatory echidna symbolises the threat to the dark generative world of nature and the unconscious by the daylight forces of philistinism and rationalism. Here the reservations expressed earlier about the symbolism of some of the poems of The Gateway and later volumes are answered in full, for the indigenous creatures—whale, platypus, termite queen and echidna—are transmuted into resonant symbols, yet their own character is not betrayed. The balance between inner and outer is exquisite, particularly in the case of the platypus; while the whale, the water-inhabiting, air-breathing mammal, becomes a wholly appropriate symbol for the dissociated psyche. Throughout Fourth Quarter symbolism is a finely integrated structural feature, exemplified not only by the basic symbolic dualisms which dominate the volume (darkness and light, water and land, dream and waking), but by the symbolism of individual poems. Wright's detachment, control and surer touch are also demonstrated in the tighter structure of these poems. Verse forms are more regular, and almost imperceptible patterns of rhyme, half-rhyme and assonance give a new sense of structure and tension to the poetry. There is a new vigour too, born of the poet's greater sense of assurance and control. This confidence is demonstrated in a number of ways: there is a wide-ranging allusiveness, a new use of wit and word-play, and an assured use of colloquialisms, often with a double meaning. "Lover, we've made, between us, / one hell of a world" ("Eve Scolds"), for instance, is suitably chilling, both in the Edenic context and the context of conservation; while "you may yet grin last" ("Easter Moon and Owl") suggests not only the visual form of the moon, but the durability of poetry and the imagination—"He who laughs last laughs longest".

Irony and humour are a feature of this volume, and a number of Wright's serious preoccupations are satirised. In "At Cedar Creek", for instance, she seeks a "formula" for poetry in a satiric "schema" which parodies her previous concern with culture, nature, primitivism and myth; the conscious and the unconscious:

Complex ritual connections
between Culture and Nature
are demonstrated by linguistic studies.
The myths of primitive people
can reveal codes
we may interpret …

Religions suppress the decays of time
and relate the Conscious
to the Unconscious (collective).
Metaphorical apprehensions
of the relations of deities, men and animals
can be set out in this schema.

"Creation-Annihilation" treats the previously sacred creative act with irreverent irony. Creation is no longer the linguistic feat of humanity, but the work of a jubilant and playful God who, with untidy gusto, scatters his "mudscraps and sparks of light" everywhere to the bewilderment of man:

Motes from his hand's delight
crowded earth, water, air,
too small, it seemed, for care;
too small for Adam's eye
when all the names began.
None of the words of man
reached lower than the Fly.

The importance of Anthony van Leeuwenhoek in the context of this poem and this volume is not only that he discovered minute forms of life such as bacteria, previously un-named and so considered not to exist, but that he established the basic unity on the level of sexual generation of humans, fleas, weevils and other "scraps and huslement[s]" of the Creation—hence Man's insecurity; he is no longer "Favourite Child"! In its wit, sheer energy and virtousity, this poem is quite different from anything previous to it. Versatility is displayed to a lesser extent in other poems of Fourth Quarter such as "Counting in Sevens" which has the surface simplicity of a child's counting rhyme, yet is a moving recapitulation of the poet's emotional life-story. Indeed the whole volume is characterised by vigour, assurance and a mastery of her medium; all of which stem from acceptance and a subsequent liberation from fear.

The publication of Phantom Dwelling, nine years after Fourth Quarter, is a striking testament to Wright's continuing vitality and poetic skill. The most obvious aspect of this volume is its energy and versatility, and it is not surprising that the dominant imagery is that of fire. At the same time its mood is relaxed, laconic and even playful. The feminine sensuality of the earlier poetry is still there, not only in the attraction to and love of nature, and in the sensuous images in which nature is celebrated, but also in the constant evocation of warmth, red wine and love—all of which have a positive affinity with fire.

Many of its themes are familiar: Wright's obsession with nature, love and language is as strong as ever, but modulated and strengthened by tolerance and detachment, the quality for which she prayed in the much earlier "Request to a Year". When love is mentioned, it is either in defiance of the autumnal season of the poems, or in delight at love's recurrence: "Blood slows, thickens, silts—yet when I saw you / once again, what a joy set this pulse jumping" ("Pressures"). Wright's obsession with nature is as strong as ever but here, more than in any preceding volume, she concedes the essential "otherness" of nature and the impossibility, as she puts it in "Rainforest", of entering the "dream", the world of the creatures. Wright has also come to terms with her family, the pastoral way of life, and her New England heritage. These are treated realistically yet compassionately in "For a Pastoral Family". Myth and language are still seen as related human constructs, the powerful and traditional symbolic forms through which humanity creates its visions of reality, and there is more attention to these than in either Alive or Fourth Quarter. Yet, at the same time, both myth and language are treated in a relaxed and often humorous manner. The local exponent of myth, the poet Christopher Brennan, is given especially tender treatment. The poem "Brennan" is not only an elegy for that incongruous and flawed figure, seen as a "black leaf blowing / in a wind of the wrong hemisphere", but also for the loss of all tradition in a world where "History's burning garbage / of myths searches / sends up its smoke-wreath / from the city dump".

In the poems of Phantom Dwelling there is a wide and eclectic reference, often to Eastern thought, myth and poetry, and the latter is envied for its brevity and clarity of its images. Where the influence of Eliot's diction and imagery was marked (and often damaging) in a number of the early poems, leading at times to stereotyped wasteland images and prosaic diction, the influence of Eastern poets, as well as the more familiar Wallace Stevens and Yeats, is obvious in this volume. One is reminded of Yeats in particular, not only by a number of direct references, but by the relaxation of tone and diction, and the obvious power and energy which spring in old age from the forgiveness of self and others.

In "Brevity", the first poem in "Notes at Edge" ("Edge" is Wright's home within the Mongarlowe Wildlife Reserve), Wright seeks a minimalist poetic—one of "honed brevities" and "inclusive silences", of "few words" and "no rhetoric", of the economy and elegance of the haiku. The poems which follow are the equivalent of botanical sketches; they capture with an almost scientific exactitude the appearance, form, shape and behaviour of an organism or a natural feature, subjected to the intent gaze of the solitary poet. She observes and records the hills in summer "where a eucalyptine vapour / dreams up in windless air"; the dead kangaroo-doe, a "slender skeleton / tumbled above the water with her long shanks / cleaned white as moonlight"; the caddis fly, a "small twilight helicoter", and the fox, that "rufous canterer". The poem "Fox" in particular is a triumph of aural as well as visual effects as it mimics the sound as well as tracing the path of the fox's escape: "running like a flame. / Against storm-black Budawang / a bushfire bristle of brush. / Under the candlebark trees / a rustle in dry litter." These spare, honed images have the greater impact because of the brevity of the poems; they are "enclosed by silence / as is the thrush's song" ("Brevity").

The most striking innovation in the volume is the sequence "The Shadow of Fire", twelve poems identified as ghazals which indicate the power and variability of Wright's poetic at this time. The extended flexible lines, the unrhymed couplets, the variable and even jaunty rhythm, are perfectly suited to both the sensuality which is characteristic of the ghazal, and the philosophical and metaphysical questioning which has always been a feature of Wright's work. Within these structures she is able to make a laconic comment such as "My generation is dying, after long lives / swung from war to depression to war to fatness" with the matter-of-fact detachment which suits the theme of this poem "Rockpool". Individual couplets have the compression, the clarity and the brilliance of haiku, for instance the lines in "Memory" which suggest love in declining years:

Now only two dragonflies dance on the narrowed water.
The river's noise in the stones is a sunken song.

Concluding couplets, with their assurance and sense of finality, encapsulate the concerns of the poem. The concluding couplet of "Rockpool", for instance, sums up that conflict between nature and the individual which has been one of Wright's lifelong obsessions:

the stretching of toothed claws to food, the breeding
on the ocean's edge. 'Accept it? Gad, madam, you had better.'

and, at the same time, dismiss it in a humorous and decisive way.

Though each poem can stand independently, the sequence read as a whole forms a meditation on life itself from the point of view of serene old age. The first ghazal "Rockpool" is concerned with the violence, the conflict, the "devouring and mating", which are the essence of physical life and which are to be observed most clearly in the microcosm of the pool:

I watch the claws in the rockpool; the scuttle, the crouch—
green humps, the biggest barnacled, eaten by seaworms.
In comes the biggest wave, the irresistible
clean wash and backswirl. Where have the dead gone?

In the context of the relentless flux of nature, and the power and impersonality of the sea which is now the great cleanser as well as obliterator, the question "Where have the dead gone?" seems irrelevant. Wright's acceptance of violence and conflict is not, however, a passive or a flaccid thing; it comes from strength, from a perception of herself as a being of fire, a part of the conflict and energy of the universe ("who wants to be a mere onlooker? Every cell of me / has been pierced through by plunging intergalactic messages", "Connections"). There is the recognition that all life—physical, spiritual and emotional—is energy, and that the you and I of the ghazal "Winter" are part of it:

The paths that energy takes on its way to exhaustion
are not to be forecast. These pathways, you and me,

followed unguessable routes. But all of us end
at the same point, like the wood on the fire,

the wine in the belly. Let's drink to that point—like Hafiz.

The symbolism of the ghazals, that of fire, is appropriate in this context, and fire appears once again in all its volatility. It can be comfortable and domestic (the hearth, the radiator, the torch) or the "fireflies, glow-worms, fungal lights" which indicate the secret life of nature. But it can also be the fire of atomic explosion which signifies the human capacity for violence: "Brighter than a thousand suns'—that blinding glare / circled the world and settled in our bones." This progression is seen in the final ghazal, "Patterns", a meditation upon human evil where Wright returns to the old Herakleitean notion of cosmic balance, of the reconciliation of opposing principles:

All's fire, said Heraclitus; measures of it
kindle as others fade. All changes yet all's one.

We are born of ethereal fire and we return there.
Understand the Logos; reconcile opposing principles.

Perhaps the dark itself is the source of meaning,
the fires of the galaxy its visible destruction …

Impossible to choose between absolutes, ultimates.
Pure light, pure lightlessness cannot be perceived …

Still unable to come completely to terms with the evil symbolised by the strontium bomb—"Well, Greek, we have not found the road to virtue. / I shiver by the fire this winter day."—Wright is still prepared to assert that humanity is born of fire, of the energy and power of the cosmos, yet somehow inexplicably given to, "possessed by", darkness.

We are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness.

The note of reconciliation and balance on which the ghazals, and the volume, conclude is also a feature of the earlier three sections—"New Zealand Poems," "Poems 1978–1980" and "Notes at Edge."

A number of the poems accept the impossibility of a complete identification with nature; of entering the consciousness of another form of life. This is the point of "Rainforest" from "Poems 1978–1980," an elegant lyric, moving and simple in its diction, imagery and emotional appeal. The poem is concerned with the "otherness" of nature, the way in which nature resists the "dividing eyes" of the human, which "measure, distinguish and are gone", and yet fail to understand the ecological unity and harmony of the rainforest where "all is one and one is all".

The ghazal "Summer" is also concerned with the human inability to enter the consciousness of nature. Here the speaker contemplates the ruins of a mining settlement and seeks the "quality" of a place which was once human, which once "drank dark blood … heard cries ande running of feet". The essence of the place is not its brief human history, marked now by "a tumble of chimney-stones / shafts near the river", but the efforts of the earth to heal itself, to rid itself of the damage of alien occupation. The business of the earth and its creatures goes on unaware of the human dimension, and unknowable to the human mind:

I'll never know its inhabitants. Evening torchlight
catches the moonstone eyes of big wolf-spiders.

All day the jenny-lizard dug hard ground
watching for shadows of hawk or kookaburra.

At evening, her pearl-eggs hidden, she raked back earth
over the tunnel, wearing a wide grey smile.

In a burned-out summer, I try to see without words
as they do. But I live through a web of language.

"Connections", another of the ghazals, treats the inability of the human mind to share the consciousness of nature with an irreverence which is characteristic of this volume: "I can smell the whitebeard heath when it's under my nose, / and that should be enough for someone who isn't a moth."

Despite this recognition of the "otherness" of nature, or perhaps because of it, the poems of this volume celebrate the earth with love; indeed no previous volume has been so concerned with nature for its own diversity, power and beauty, rather than in relation to humanity, or as a personal threat to the individual. The power of nature is now fearlessly acknowledged, in images which glory in its contending forces:

Deep down, the world-plates struggle
in strangling quiet on each other.
Offshore, deliberate breakers hit the coasts.
"From the Wellington Museum"

The progression of the seasons is likewise no longer seen as a mythic analogue for the human condition, but is celebrated for its own beauty and power. Detachment brings a cosmic rather than a human perspective, and in "Backyard" autumn is celebrated in an original, startling and completely appropriate image:

Autumn swings earth round sun
at the invisible lasso's end,
turning this latitude south and winterward.

From an ant's-eye view, as it were, Wright moves into closer focus to observe, with detached interest, the carrying out of earth's "ancient orders", as the Autumn season enacts the "shorthand" encoded in the seasonal change:

In last alchemic leaves held to the light,
in soundless bursts of seed,
in the tough satin of the spider's case
and the foam-plastic comb the mantis lays,
in branched green-copper-scaly spires of dock
the season's shorthand coils its final code;
This treeless trampled scrap of earth
fibrous with rot and weed
repeats its ancient orders. Use all death
to feed all life. The lockup of the frost
will melt, the codes translate with nothing lost.

There is complete assurance here, the assurance of the achieved vision which no longer fears the "ancient orders" of the earth, orders which are to "Use all death / to feed all life".

The compressed accuracy and appeal of the natural images in "Notes at Edge" is also a feature of the sequence "Four Poems from New Zealand," which captures the New Zealand landscape with unerring accuracy: a countryside of "Gorse, bracken, blackberries" which "scab over wounded ground"; of sheep which "eat, eat, eat and trot dementedly"; and of the beach at Hokitika:

A narrow shelf below the southern alps,
a slate-grey beach scattered with drifted wood
darkens the sullen jade
of Tasman's breakers. Blackbacked gulls
hunt the green turn of waves.

The sequence also captures another reality; that of a colonised nation whose history in many ways parallels that of Australia; the nation, like Wellington, is "built on a fault-line". Images of colonisation are everywhere: in the placenames, the country rituals, the Anglicised tea-shops, and the attitudes, for instance the negal-granite stance" of a "grizzled man, scotch-eyed, grey-overcoated". Despite the poem's acknowledgement of political realities, these images are presented without rancour. But behind the comfortable images of European settlement Wright perceives another reality, the dark spirit of the forest and the alien landscape of New Zealand—"a swoop of mountains, scope of snow / northward and southward. Jags, saw-teeth, blades of light / nobody could inhabit"—and this reality is Maori. The empathy of the Maori with the land is captured in Wright's image of the Maori genealogies in the Wellington museum:

Vine-spiralling Maori genealogies,
carved paths through forests
inscribed with life-forms, coded histories tangled my eyes
never quite able to meet that paua-stare.

The genealogies, the natural history and the traditions of the Maori are "coded", their essential meaning unavailable to the white observer who is "never quite able to meet that paua-stare". Wright is closest to Maori reality on the deserted beach at Hokitika where she contemplates the solitary figure of a Maori girl: "But for her smile, the beach is bare." The sequence concludes with an image of reconciliation, of the recognition and celebration of all struggle, of "being, itself. Being that's ground by glaciers, seas and time".

Three poems from "Poems 1978–1980"—"Smalltown Dance", "For a Pastoral Family" and "Words, Roses, Stars"—return to familiar themes and demonstrate Wright's continuing skill and versatility. The first of these is an elegant and accomplished poem which explores, as did a number of earlier poems, the metaphysical implications of humble domestic activity. The poem is concerned with the way in which the feminine spirit is enthralled, in bondage to an all too easy and often attractive domesticity. The smalltown dance of the title is that of women folding the sheets in an ancient ritual, and the poem begins with a particularly impressive image, that of the finding of the square-root of the sheet, the pulling on its diagonal to straighten the warp:

Two women find the square-root of a sheet.
This is an ancient dance:
arms wide: together: again: two forward steps: hands meet
your partner's once and twice.

The mathematical connotations of this image are appropriate to the programmed, ritualised dance of the women. As well, the pulling into shape against the warp could be symbolically significant not only for the sheets, but also for the women. The world enclosed by the sheets on washday is a world which is a loving and comforting one for the child: "Simpler than arms, they wrapped and comforted / clean corridors of hiding, roofed with blue." However, although the child has a sense of unlimited possibility symbolised by "that glimpse of unobstructed waiting green", the poem is full of images of female suppression. The image of the clean sheets, those "wallowing white dreamers" of the washday world, can also apply to the feminine psyche: "The sheets that tug / sometimes struggle from the peg, / don't travel far" and dreams must be surrendered to the constriction of the domestic cupboard:

First pull those wallowing white dreamers down,
spread arms: then close them. Fold
those beckoning roads to some impossible world …
That white expanse
reduces to a neat
compression fitting in the smallest space
a sheet can pack in on a cupboard shelf.

What is noticeable about the poem is the humorous and relaxed tone; the sustained imagery by which the humble washday provides a symbolic reference for female destiny; the return to imagery of the dance, the pattern of life itself; and the evocation, once again, of the paradisal world of the child in contrast to the ritualised repression of the adult world.

In the sequence "For a Pastoral Family" Wright returns to and revalues her New England heritage. With old age and the dropping of all pretence there is no longer a need to distance the pastoral world by romantic nostalgia as in "South of my Days", by castigation as in "Eroded Hills", or by mythologising as in "Falls Country". These earlier poems, fine in themselves, mark stages through which the poet has passed on her way to a human acceptance of all aspects of her heritage. This involves a direct confrontation with the issues of corruption, of self-interest, guilt and evasion on which the pastoral conquest was based and then sustained. The tone varies from ironic, to patronising, to sarcastic as the sequence satirises first of all an "arrogant clan" who were "fairly kind to horses / and to people not too different from ourselves", then the rationalisations of the past, in particular those concerning the massacre and dispersal of the Aborigines: "after all / the previous owners put up little fight, / did not believe in ownership, and so were scarcely human." Her own generation was protected by a "comforting cover of legality" for:

the really deplorable deeds
had happened out of our sight, allowing us innocence.
We were not born, or there was silence kept.

At the same time, despite this clear-sighted satire, the paradisal beauty of the pastoral life, the seasons, and the child's world is recognised. Nostalgia breaks through in "Kinship", which dwells lovingly upon memories of a sheltered childhood, the shared life of the children, Wright's two younger brothers and herself, now "two old men, one older woman", and the ties which persist between them, despite political and other differences:

Blue early mist in the valley. Apricots
bowing the orchard trees, flushed red with summer,
loading bronze-plaqued branches;
our teeth in those sweet buttock-curves. Remember
the horses swinging to the yards, the smell
of cattle, sweat and saddle-leather?
Blue ranges underlined the sky. In any weather
it was well, being young and simple,
letting the horses canter home together.

"Smalltown Dance" and "Kinship" are the latest, but perhaps not the final poems, in a series which deals with the paradisal world of the child and contrasts it with the corrupt world of the adult. "Change" uses the imagery of the mountain stream (from Yeats) to express the inevitability of corruption: "streams go / through settlement and town / darkened by chemical silt. / Dams hold and slow them down, / trade thickens them like guilt. / All men grow evil with trade / as all roads lead to the city." At the same time, in a gesture of balance and reconciliation which is characteristic of this volume, Wright recognises that the alternative, remaining in the cold purity of the hills, must result in ignorance.

The third of these poems is "Words, Roses, Stars", dedicated to the poet John Bechervaise, and perhaps the most assured of all that series of poems, from the fifties onward, in which Wright deals with the relationship between the world, the human mind and language. "Words, Roses, Stars" skilfully accommodates its philosophical complexity, and the subtle progression of its thought, within the lyric form. The address is direct, to "my friend" Bechervaise and to all of us, to "you, and you", who are under instruction as to the simplicity and absolute Tightness of philosophical concepts which were once handled in a ponderous and problematic way. The rose itself is a "swirl of atoms", an image which captures the shape and movement and physical composition of the bloom. But the rose is also a human construct, for it is "bodied in a word. / And words are human":

A rose, my friend, a rose—
and what's a rose?
A swirl of atoms bodied in a word.
And words are human; language comes and goes
with us, and lives among us. Not absurd
to think the human spans the Milky Way.

The second stanza recognises the beauty, the appeal and the validity of all three ways of looking at nature, through myth, through science, and through the language in which both myth and science are expressed. Myth is the "gift of life, the endless dream" and science is a visionary search for a "mathematical glory in the sky":

Baiame bends beside his crystal stream
shaded beneath his darker cypress-tree
and gives the gift of life, the endless dream,
to Koori people, and to you and me.
Astronomers and physicists compute
a mathematical glory in the sky.
But all these calculations, let's admit,
are filtered through a human brain and eye.

The knowledge that "words are human" is no longer a threat as it was in the earlier "The Lake" or "Nameless Flower", for "sight and touch and scent / join in that symbol" and "the word is true, / plucked by a path where human vision went". This is a significant reassertion of the power of vision. While there is a constant recognition in this volume that humans cannot "see without words" ("Summer") and that all vision is "filtered through a human brain and eye" the earlier defensiveness and fear is gone.

Reconciliation and balance are key concepts in these last poems and are expressed in finely balanced images which contain and reconcile opposing states such as old age and love:

fallen leaves on the current scarcely move
But the kingfisher flashes upriver still.
"Dust"

There are also overt statements of reconciliation like that which concludes Phantom Dwelling—"We are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness"—perhaps the best example with which to conclude this study. There is, however, no real conclusion, for there is as yet no conclusion to Wright's work. What is obvious is the energy with which she continues to express her timeless obsessions with nature, love and language. It is as if old age had produced an alchemic change, ridding the poetry of the baser elements, the fear, defensiveness and the dwelling upon philosophical qualifications which inhibited many of the poems of her middle years. Her declaration, in the ghazal "Oppositions"—"I choose fire, not snow"—is more than justified.