[In this review of Wright's retrospective collection The Double Tree, Pritchard notes an increasing flexibility in Wright's poetic tone, comparing her work to that of D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats.]

Judith Wright is an Australian poet, author of 10 books of verse from which the present selection [The Double Tree] has been made. Assuming that American readers need help with work that comes out of an unfamiliar country, she provides an introduction telling us a bit about Australia, of where she was born and brought up (the New England Country of New South Wales), and of her life during World War II and after, her founding of a society for wildlife conservation, her membership on a government committee of inquiry. It is an odd way to introduce one's poems, and in fact although I am unfamiliar enough with dingoes and wagtails, or with "the whipstick scrub on the Thirty-Mile Dry" (these occur in "Drought Year"), she surely overestimates the remoteness of her experience and materials. Especially since she writes in a forcefully direct manner, has no interest in obliquities or ambiguities of expression and finds English syntax fully adequate to her concerns.

These concerns are no less than typically human ones—observations about nature and human nature, birds and daughters, growing up and growing old, momentary discoveries that make a difference to the self:

Walking one lukewarm, lamp-black night I heard,
a yard from me his harsh rattle of warning,
and in a landing-net of torch-light saw him crouch—

…

A bird with a broken breast. But what a stare
he fronted me with!—his look abashed my own.
He was all eyes, furious, meant to wound.
And I, who meant to heal, took in my hand
his depth of down, his air-light delicate bone,
his heart in the last extreme of pain and fear.

If one thinks of D. H. Lawrence's "Birds, Beasts and Flowers," Judith Wright has the advantage in reality. She is wary about turning birds into symbols, at least until they have been established in their own birdlike identities; while the modest but subtle tone and pace of her lines build confidence in us rather than (as too often with Lawrence) alienating us by their exclamatory hysteria.

Her own voice—and readers of different temperament may not agree—is a high outer seriousness unrelieved, in the poems from the 1940's and 1950's, by inner humor. As with her introduction, her poems do not always avoid solemnity. A list of most-used words from the volume's first half would include "love," "eternity," "life," "star," "blood," "death," "seed," "flesh," "tree," "bird," "dream," "faith" and "night," a diction she shares with Edwin Muir, whom she resembles in other ways. One is also conscious of Yeats in these earlier poems, but Judith Wright was reluctant or unable to dramatize an "I" with much individuality, so that when (in "Dream") she writes "O dying tree, I move beneath your shade," or "I sought upon the hill the crimson rose," the personal engagement feels minimal and the poetry rather conventional.

Somewhere around the mid-1960's her work grew more various, more flexible in tone, willing on occasion to eschew rhyme and exploit lines of irregular length. While not in themselves virtues, these practices may have helped move her in the direction of more pointedly personal reflection.

By the 1970's her poetic presence is a more inclusive one, able to say one thing and mean another, take on a dead metaphor and resucitate it, as in "Black/White":

This time I shall recover
from my brief blowtorch fever,
The sweats of living
flood me; I wake again,
pondering the moves of anti and of pro.
Back into play I go.

Had it been pro-biotics they gave me
would I still live?
Anti-biotics maybe snub the truth
cheating the black King's
move—
emptily save me,
a counter-ghost tricked from a rightful death.

Off-rhymes, the witty invention of "pro-biotics" and of "blowtorch" as an adjective contribute to the generally sharp alterness and agility of this verse, which embodies the moves and "play" of its main metaphor:

But you can play on black squares or on white,
do without counters even; in theory
even the dead still influence what we do,
direct our strategy.
I'm none too sure exactly why I'm here,
which side I'm playing for—

Complicating itself, the poem risks confusion, then snaps back to pull itself together, its author unwilling to fall upon the thorns of life for very long:

But still here's day, here's night,
the checkerboard of yes and no
and take and give.
Again I meet you face to face,
which in itself is unexpected grace.
To arms, my waiting opposite—
we live.

A final, extra line, strong rhymes, a balanced readiness to resume: both serious and humorous, it shows this accomplished poet at her best.