A Human Pattern: Selected Poems

by Judith A. Wright

A Human Selected Poems

Genres: Poetry

242 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1992

About the author

Judith Wright was probably Australia's greatest poet; she was also an ardent conservationist and activist. She died in 2000, at the age of 85.

Over a long and distinguished literary career, she published poetry, children's books, literary essays, biographies, histories and other works of non-fiction.

Her commitment to the Great Barrier Reef began in 1962, when she helped found the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. She went on to become a member of the Committee of Enquiry into the National Estate and life member of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Judith Wright worked tirelessly to promote land rights for Aboriginal people and to raise awareness among non-Aboriginal Australians of their plight arising from the legacy of European settlement. She has written The Cry for the Dead (1981), We Call for a Treaty (1985) and Born of the Conquerors (1991).

Judith Wright was awarded many honours for her writing, including the Grace Leven Award (twice), the New South Wales Premier's Prize, the Encyclopedia Britannica Prize for Literature, and the ASAN World Prize for Poetry. She has received honorary degrees (D.Litt.) from the Universities of New England, Sydney Monash, Melbourne, Griffith and New South Wales and the Australian National University. In 1994 she received the Human Rights Commission Award for Collected Poems.

Reviews

[Ely · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really tried, but this is just not the kind of poetry I like. There were a few at the start that I really liked but after that it was just not my thing.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a poetry of cryptic utterance, and a poetry of direct statement. Judith Wright was a proponent of both. In her early poetry, everything in the world is something else:

Out of the torn earth's mouth
comes the old cry of praise.
Still is the song made flesh
though the singer dies—

That is a flame-tree, bursting from the ground in a quarry. These waves of 'The Surfer' are similarly otherworldly:

For on the sand the grey-wolf sea lies snarling;
cold twilight wind splits the waves' hair and shows
the bones they worry in their wolf-teeth.

These a cryptic utterances. They say much, but not directly. In her earlier poems, Wright did not preach or protest. She observed and felt and imagined the forms of her thought in the things around her. Reality was a great riddle. She could always see its riddling qualities.

It was not to remain so. Reading through her selected poems, we witness the transformation of a formidable mind. She is like Thomas Mann in this regard. Her younger self was comparatively apolitical. But like Mann, a life of witnessing led her to become committed. She found that hermitude was impossible. The wrong world, the cruel world, the world of cunning and power, found its way into her rural retreat. Her later poems address this world directly:

You were one of the dark children
I wasn't allowed to play with—
riverbank campers, the wrong colour
(I couldn't turn you white.)

The poems in A Human Pattern slowly soak up a sense of tragedy, and by the end of the book it is a bleak vision Wright has of her country, Australia:

I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust,
the drying creek, the furious animal,
that they oppose us still;
that we are ruined by the thing we kill.

These are the twin pillars of her art: her strong sense of religion (for want of a better word) and her passionate positions about Aboriginal people, social justice and the environment. There is something of Percy Shelley in her poetry. She has a similar sweetness of tone in many of her mystical poems, and a similar snarling brilliance in her political ones.

What makes her a truly unique and great poet, however, are other qualities which are harder to pin down. A Human Pattern culminates in two short sequences, 'Notes at Edge' and 'The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals', which particularly display the deep strengths of her poetry.

I stoke the fire with wood
laced with mycelia, tread
a crust of moss and lichen.
Over the wet decay
of log and fallen branch
there spreads an embroidery, ancient
source of the forests.

There is a poise to lines like these. Wright constantly compares poets to prophets, and when she mentions other poets, they tend to be particularly enthusiastic and profuse ones, like Keats, Blake, Harpur, Traherne and Brennan. But when she describes her own experiences, she does so with admirable detachment. She can describe her sense of connection to all living things without mentioning herself at all, by finding a precise and unexpected image—in this case, the ramifying mycelia of invisible fungi. Some lines from another poem on the same theme, 'Connections', reveals other aspects of her technique:

The tiny clusters of whitebeard heath are in flower:
their scent has drawn to them moths from how far away?

When I look up at the stars I don't try counting,
but I know that the lights I see can pass right through me.

What mind could weave such a complicated web?
Systems analysis might make angels giggle.

A child, I buried the key of a sardine-tin.
Resurrected, I thought, it might unlock the universe.

Picking up shells on the beach, said Isaac Newton.
Catch a modern physicist using such a comparison.

What I find remarkable in these lines is the flow of the ideas. Each couplet could be a standalone poem, and she makes huge leaps between times, places, and topics each time she moves from one couplet to the next. Yet her meaning is clear and easy. It is remarkable how she can turn the most abstruse philosophical disquisitions into the most demotic verse.

Those were her very last poems, of course, the fruit of a lifetime's writing, travel and reflection. The fruit of a lifetime's learning, too. I have read few poets whose views of life and poetry change so radically over the years.

You ask me to read those poems I wrote in my thirties?
They dropped off several incarnations back.

It is a terribly sad thing to read her poems. She was part of the generation when Australian writers truly came of age, when Aboriginal writers joined the literary world, when the best writers finally escaped the colonial mindset, when Australia won its imaginative independence. Her verse thrums with a passionate sense of inheritance, history, and responsibility. This coming of age was also a loss of innocence, however. It is no surprise that Eve is one of the most common figures in Wright's verse. Eve was an exploiter of the land, a sinner, an ignorant youngling thrust into a new country. So Wright felt her own people were, though there was always the chance that the beautiful and open parts of the human spirit would eventually triumph.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poets, like pretty much any other artists, have phases and sometimes they get to the point where they disown earlier work, or at least make efforts to have these "indiscretions" (usually borne of political fervor) stricken from the record. Langston Hughes, for instance, wrote a raft of pro-Communism poems that he expressly kept out of his collected works, or at least the works he had control over before his death, after which such selection was all naturally in the hands of his estate.

This preamble is especially important when considering this collection, since here we have a span of poems written over the course of roughly fifty years in the life of a poet. I found some of the poems gorgeous, some slack, a couple truly remarkable (especially the last in the collection, the semi-eponymous "Patterns"). Some of it I found insufferable, either for its strident didactic quality (man bad, nature good, we get it), or for the form taken (Wright has a razor-keen command of form, which makes the free verse stuff even worse, since if she was talentless it would be an excusable cop-out).

Yet I would be remiss if I didn't point out that some of her poems (the best ones, in my opinion) show an ambivalence, something beyond polemics, a peek into the ur-stuff that the truly great attain (like Robinson Jeffers) when she seems to consider nature, man, and science from a provenance that's hard to place, and not quite the point-of-view of God, Man, or Nature, but some blend that is uniquely hers. It's a bit like Georg Trakl's poetry where sometimes (as one scholar said), There's no poetic "I."

And then there are the other, more literal poems in which some (seemingly) Betty Friedan-inspired stanzas about marriage and kids hold their own alongside Dinggedichte from the perspective of creaky houses, photo albums, or pieces of furniture.

My critiques are probably more ideological than aesthetic, since there will never be an (uncontested) definition of poetry (and maybe there shouldn't be), and I've always preferred the narrative-like scansion of formal poetry to the un-rhymed and un-metered stuff that reads to me like half-baked semi-Haiku.

I'll just close out this review by saying that Wright was a serious poet, and deserves to be read and remembered, and that regardless of your own biases or tastes, you will most likely find something in here to admire.

[C.T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why didn't I read this sooner?

Already familiar and enamored with the handful of Judith Wright's poems I sampled in college, this spring I set out to create a poem consisting solely of all of this collection's poem titles, even before I'd read half their contents. I have a draft I've reworked several times, still to be finalized. Having finished the reading meanwhile, my intended tribute poem, though especially challenging for self-imposed limits, seems even more imperative.

A fellow bird lover, she's made me love them more. Not having had Australia on my to-see list, she's made me want to visit. Attuned to nature, art, existentialism, the personal, regional, and universal, and written in a formal mode--with captivating invented rhyme schemes--that feels free flowing, Wright's self-selected compilation of four decades' work resonates soundly with me.

It bears reading and re-reading for the joy of language, layers of meaning, dynamic and seasoned poetics, a tone that penetrates as it reassures, candid personal experiences, and anecdotes of the Antipodes in the mid-20th century. These clear and contemplative portraits of flora and fauna, world and humanity, arrive from unexpected angles and keep the reader guessing but engaged to their wise and memorable ends.

Above all, it's Judith Wright's deft balance of heart, mind, form, and subject along each poem's path that recommends the journey.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judith Wright’s poetry is highly vivid and descriptive. Often dark, always beautiful, and written from the perspective of the twentieth century and the confrontation of issues of personal liberty in Australia to the world at large, Wright should be considered among the great poets of the century. The closing lines of “Midnight” are foreboding and representative of the tortured introspection present in much of Wright’s poetry.
so let my blood reshape its dream,
drawn into that tideless stream;
that shadowless and burning night
of darkness where I find my sight. (36)
At once personal and troubling, it is verses like this throughout the collection that stop the reader cold and force introspection.

“All Things Conspire” is another such poem, this time focused on relationships.
All things conspire to hold me from you—
even my love,
since that would mask you and unnamed you
till merely woman and man we live.
All men wear arms against the rebel;
and they are wise,
since the sound would they know and stable
is eaten away by lovers’ eyes.

All things conspire to stand between us—
even you and I,
who still command us, still unjoin us,
and drive us forward till we die.
Not till those fiery ghosts are laid
shall we be one.
Till then, they whet our double blade
and use the turning world for stone.

The end of “The Morning of the Dead” strikes me as a modern lament.
Oh make me perfect.
Burn with a fire of sight the substance of my sorrow.
Take what I was and find in it that truth
the universes on their holy journey
watch with their eyes of fire. Illuminate my death.
Till all the dead stand in their essence shining
Time has not learned its meaning.” (129)

“Autumn Fires” cannot but force metaphorical consideration of the dry leaves and twigs as matches for the world in its mutually assured destruction.
Old flower-stems turn to sticks in autumn,
clutter the garden, need
the discipline of secateurs.
Choked overplus, straggle of weed,
cold souring strangling webs of root;

I pile the barrow with the lot.
Snapped twig that forgets flower and fruit,
thornbranch too hard to rot,
I stack you high for a last rite.

When twigs are built and match is set,
your death springs up like life; its flare
crowns and consumes the ended year.
Corruption changes to desire
that sears the pure and wavering air,
and death goes upward like a prayer. (130)

One of my favorite poems is “Picture”:
So eagerly lightly the man
stroked his colours on—
the tawny sleepy slopes
the mood-dark mountains behind
and the fall and change of light
through clouds gentler than blue.
I stroke his hills too,
their bodies stretched in the mind.

Can only the young love
like this, with so tender a hand
and eye, see so
purely the earth’s moment?
Past middle-age, I fidget,
pick at the years’ callus
that cataracts my sight,
dulls my hand like a glove.

In what he paints I see
an earth I used to know,
light stroking slopes aglow,
earth various as flesh
and flesh its own delight;
and feel the young man stroking
his love, his earth, with a hand.
Time locks us up in the mind,
but leaves this window, art. (178)

The collection closes with, perhaps a warning. From “The Shadows of Fires: Ghazals” Wright preaches:
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.

Round earth’s circumference and atmosphere
bombs and warheads crouch waiting their time. (242)

Often troubling, always beautiful, this is a great volume of poetry.