Why Wright will endure

In 1956, A Book of Australian Verse, edited by Judith Wright, was published by Oxford University Press. Her choice of her own poems included ‘Bullocky’ and a couple of others, the over-anthologising of which, at the expense of her other work, was later understandably to provoke her exasperation. Reading them again today, in her Collected Poems, pleasure is not diminished by familiarity. The 426 pages of her work in this new edition confirm her position as the richest and most rewarding of living Australian poets. Of course, she is also of much wider than local importance. I remember, in the late 1960s, hearing the Russian poet, Yevtushenko, telling a huge audience for a poetry reading in Georgia, in what was then the USSR, that the two greatest living women poets were Bella Akhmadulina and Judith Wright. (Yevtushenko, who is very well read in English and American poetry, was demonstrating a freedom from the London–New York axis not shared by most English or Americans. I have been unable to detect the name of a single Australian poet in Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature.) Judith Wright’s long introduction to her 1956 anthology provides some interesting background to her poetic thinking. In it she writes: The difficulties of Australian poets have been many, and are still formidable enough. The most important has been the lack of any living link with the country itself. Australia was settled, in the first instance, by convicts and soldiery transported against their will, and in the second, by enterprising and materially-minded men anxious to make money and return to England as soon as possible. For many years a conception of Australia as a country to be loved or valued for itself was rare and difficult to uphold among such men and their descendants. Within a mere ten years, the great US wave had washed over Australian poetry, and it would have been anathema for most of the poets collected in John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry to be caught out giving a damn for ‘any living link with the country itself’. The situation was more like that in Rae Desmond Jones’s ‘The Poets’: they speak to a vast audienceconsisting mainly of one anotherall of whom nervously shufflemanuscripts & wait their turnmeantime the masses who areas usual deaf blind & stupidjust keep walking to the bus orinto the office reading newspapers& quite obviously don’t give a fuck. But somehow Judith Wright’s poetry itself has never gone out of fashion. There are some controversial omissions and short-changings in John Tranter and Philip Mead’s Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, but, after Robert Adamson and Francis Webb Judith Wright runs third, together with Kenneth Slessor and James McAuley. Judith Wright has never abandoned her ‘living links with the country’; indeed, they have agonisingly burnt into her flesh. But she has also been the poet of so many other themes and moods. Some of her best poems are love poems – love between woman and man, mother and child, people and country. Her gaze is not one-way: ‘Lord, how the earth and the creatures look at me.’ So when she writes about birds or trees or, most painfully, a flying-fox caught on barbed wire, she is in touch with currents of energy that go beyond individual creatures or things. It is as Herakleitos said, in the epigraph to Judith Wright’s 1955 volume, The Two Fires: ‘this world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.’ The country realities of her childhood have made her immune to picture-postcards, and also have given her observing eye a good measure of the human comedy against the background of nature. She has always been especially sensitive to the dilemmas of age. There are also some cool and deft observations, calling for nerve and firmness, as were possessed by her great-great-grandmother in that classic ‘Request to a Year’. (She, high on a mountain in Switzerland, kept on sketching as her son, floating on a small ice-floe, seemed about to go over a waterfall. ‘Bring me the firmness of her hand’, asks her great-great-granddaughter.) There is plenty of irony in Judith Wright, a wry sense of what’s gone wrong behind the posturings of success, but she has no time for the evasions of the smart poet who stands apart. She is linked (not technically, of course) with poets as wildly dissimilar as Keats or Whitman – for her it has to be proved upon our pulses, she has to have suffered, to have been there. A lot of versifiers might well have listened to her ‘Advice to a Young Poet’: There’s a carefully neutral toneyou must obey;there are certain things you must learnnever to say. … Don’t stamp or scream; take the Exit doorif you must; no hurry. To return to the theme of love, Judith Wright has never let go of that need, enunciated in the Introduction to her 1956 anthology, to love and value Australia for itself. But more and more, especially as she turned back to her ancestors’ pioneering history, the proud kinship of Generations of Men became the bitter complicity in guilt of Cry for the Dead. In her article ‘The Upside-Down Hut’, published in Australian Letters in 1961, she took the two basic Australian themes to be exile and hope. But even then, in the same article she quoted some ferocious lines about this country, from Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney: ‘Its heart is made of salt; it suddenly oozes from its burning pores, gold which will destroy men in greed, but not water to give them drink.’ In ‘Australia 1970’ she picks images of rage and hatred and says: For we are conquerors and self-poisonersmore than scorpion or snakeand dying of the venomsthat we makeeven while you die of us. Near the end of Collected Poems, in ‘For a Pastoral Family’, she makes a kind of peace with her brothers and ancestors: We were fairly kind to horsesand to people not too different from ourselves But still, they remain a hair shirt to her, as Patrick White’s similar pastoral heritage was to him. She cannot forgive the wrongs done to the Aborigines and to the environment. Perhaps she has taken too much upon herself. One remembers the Psalm: The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever. What saves Judith Wright is that she never loses that further vision of Herakleitos. In one of her last poems, ‘Counting in Sevens’, she goes through the joys and tragedies (although she does not mention the terrible affliction of her deafness) throughout the seven-year intervals of her life. The poem, published when she was seventy (she is now seventy-eight), ends with a simple thought that reaches beyond age or personal history: Yet with every added seven,some strange present I was given. Perhaps, even though a couple of years late, that present is this volume of her poems, which is also a present to all who love her work and a sure token that it will endure.

Geoffrey Dutton

From the New Issue

‘“Thin labourism”: How is the Albanese government travelling?’ by Frank Bongiorno

The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

Thunderhead by Miranda Darling

The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten ancient creatures that make us human by Julia Kindt

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