A Human Pattern

Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of Australia’s best loved, and essential, poets. Devoted to place, responsive to landscape and to the violence done to the land and its inhabitants, John Kinsella says in his introduction,‘she looked inwards into Australia, and in doing so made the local...universal’. A Human Pattern, a selected poems she prepared after she had abandoned writing poetry in order to devote her remaining years to fighting for Aboriginal rights and conservation, presents her best work from 1946 to her last collection, Phantom Dwelling (1986). Australia, alive with human and natural history, is vibrant in this selection. She is, John Kinsella’s writes, ‘a poet of human contact with the land’. She speaks directly to our perennial concerns.