Never from earth again the coolamon,
or thin black children dancing like the shadows
of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history,
that has sunk many islands in its good time.

                              from ‘Nigger’s Leap: New England’

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.

CONTENTS

Foreword
Introduction

FROM THE MOVING IMAGE
The Company of Lovers
Bora Ring
Blue Arab
Trapped Dingo
Remittance Man
Soldier’s Farm
The Trains
The Idler
The Hawthorn Hedge
Nigger’s Leap: New England
Bullocky
Brother and Sisters
South of My Days
The Surfer
For New England
The Moving Image

FROM WOMAN TO MAN
Woman to Man
Woman’s Song
Woman to Child
Conch shell
The Maker
The Sisters
Spring After War