Review of The Poetry of Judith Wright by Shirley Walker

Abstract

The Poetry ofJudith Wright is the most detailed and satisfactory attempt so far to describe Judith Wright's thematic concerns in enough detail to do justice to the poems which embody them. As such it is the end product of the most valuable tradition of writing about the poet, a tradition made up of those essays which have engaged her ideas rather than simply admired either her precocious lyric gift or her unselfconscious use of the Australian landscape. That Dr. Walker's book has the air of a pioneering work about it rather than that of the kind of statement which builds on previous work and at the same time subsumes it, is an index of the complexity of Wright's ideas and the difficulty of adequately describing them.