POETS Day! Judith Wright, Who’s from Australia

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday?

The idea…

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Poetry Foundation, and so Poetry magazine by extension or implication depending on which is now considered the over company, has a beef with Judith Wright. To be fair, they positively reviewed her collection, Birds, in the December 1964 issue, writing that “The form is conventional, the tone often that of a skillful, rhyming bird-lover. But the observation is acute and uncompromising and there is sometimes a surprising vigor in the transmission.” It’s praise as contrast to what is not said, but praise. And then, nothing.

Wright is among the more celebrated poets in Australia. If you’re just breaking into the Australian literary scene you’d be lucky to be considered for the Judith Wright Poetry Award for New and Emerging Poets. Got a new book out? There’s the Judith Wright Award for poetry collection by Australians. Alternately, your book or “poem of substantial length,” says Wikipedia, may qualify for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, given each year at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. I’ve found descriptions and pictures of monuments praising her work for indigenous people, the extent and form of which I’m ignorant but it’s at least cleared the start-small-construction bar of worthiness. She worked to save the Great Barrier Reef in addition to playing a part in other environmental efforts. According to Wikipedia, “With some of her friends, she helped found one of the earliest nature conservation movements,” which is vague enough to conjure all manner of questions I’ll not need answered for the moment if ever but I’m sure you can read all about it at the Judith Wright Arts Centre in the Fortitude Valley suburb of Brisbane. She’s kind of a big deal.

A search for “Judith Wright” on the poetryfoundation.org site brings up a standard page of twenty results but it’s only the second that mentions her in either the title or the blurb or teaser or whatever you call the few sentences and fragments printed beneath a result link. That second is the Birds review, which is actually five quick one-or-two paragraph reviews of five books recently released circa 1964, so it’s not like a spotlight was on her in that one.

The first result is for the author bio page of Judith Beveridge. Those author bios, which they feature for seemingly every poet of note not named Judith Wright, are a fantastic resource and I’ve praised them in these electronic pages before. This one lets the reader know that Judith Beveridge was the winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, in fact the winner of the inaugural Judith Wright Calanthe Award, in 2004. It’s the impression that there’s a noteworthy award named for an unnoteworthy poet.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope there’s something wrong with my search button clicking research methods and I missed her, but I doubt it. For comparison, nineteen of the twenty results for James Franco, whose poetry reveals in a primal and direct way that he should stick to acting, feature the name “James Franco” in the title: “James Franco’s Ten Favorite Books,” “James Franco Has the Heart of a Poet,” “James Franco & the Materialistic Demons from Today’s Celebrity Age.” Most of them are mocking, brutal reviews, but his first chapbook gets more mention than her non-Bird book books do. She checks all the piety boxes Poetry Foundation seems to admire. It doesn’t make sense. She must have had a lapse or lashed out in a weak moment; really pouted crossly at the magazine to get so cold a shoulder.

The 1964 review called this first one “the book’s best poem.”

Dove-Love
Judith Wright (1915-2000)

The dove purrs—over and over the dove
purrs its declaration. The wind’s tone
changes from tree to tree, the creek in stone
alters its sob and fall, but still the dove
goes insistently on, telling its love
“I could eat you.”

And in captivity, they say doves do.
Gentle, methodical, starting with the feet
(the ham-pink succulent toes
on their thin stems of rose),
baring feather by feather the wincing meat:
“I could eat you.”

That neat suburban head, that suit of grey,
watchful conventional eye and manicured claw—
these also rhyme with us. The doves play
on one repetitive note that plucks the raw
helpless nerve, their soft “I do. I do.
I could eat you.”

I love the turn towards the macabre. When I first wrote that last sentence I did so before the poem, but I wanted to share the “Wait, where is this going?” moment at “And in captivity…” without spoiling it. “Ham-pink succulent toes” and “wincing meat.” There’s an underlying seriousness, but it’s the playful shock I admire.

Bora was a ceremony, possibly still is, performed as an initiation by Eastern Australian aboriginals. As I invite anyone who knows better to correct me, the ceremony seems to involve moving participants from one ring to another, symbolizing the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood. Most sites have two rings, but three is not uncommon. I don’t know if the third was meant to be purgatorial or represented a third stage or something else entirely.

In this next poem, Wright marks the passing of a traditional way of life.

Bora Ring

The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.

Only the grass stands up
to mark the dancing-ring: the apple-gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmurs a broken chant.

The hunter is gone: the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.

Only the rider’s heart
halts at a sightless shadow, and unsaid word
that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain.

“Bora Ring” was the first of her poems I came across. Aside from her skilled imagery, I was struck by an editorial decision in the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol 2. “Bora Ring” got a footnote describing it as “Site of initiation ceremonies held by Australian Aborigines,” and “corroboree” got one as “Nighttime ceremony held by the Aborigines. Apple-gums: Australian timber trees.” Both were helpful. Aboriginal and Australian terms aren’t well known outside of The Upside Down. But “Cain” got a footnote that shouldn’t be necessary. “Son of Adam and Eve, who, in killing his brother, Abel, committed the first murder (Genesis 4.1-16); ‘the ancient curse” is the curse of God upon Cain.” But for the saving capitalization of “God,” that that footnote was thought necessary imposes a meta consideration on the passing of a traditional way of life. Mathew Arnold shudders.

This final poem is about change. As with a lot of her poems I’ve read, there’s redemption, which is wonderful in adventures but miserable if all that’s good is hidden day to day. I worry about her as best I can worry about someone whose lot is cast and time here is done. She’s not alone in believing that if you look hard enough and in the right places, you find wonders and rightness. Here the lines “I would not have you believe / the world is empty of truth / or that men must grieve,” serves that outlook; a glum outlook that relegates most around us to obscuring malevolency if it’s paired with the belief that wonders don’t assert themselves. It’s appealing to think of yourself as a candle in the darkness or even to know what drawer the candles are in, but it seems a vanity. I like her well enough from reading. I hope her life wasn’t as sorrowful as I get from that fraction I’ve come across.

To a Child

When I was a child I saw
a burning bird in a tree.
I see became I am,
I am became I see.

In winter dawns of frost
the lamp swung in my hand.
The battered moon on the slope
lay like a dune of sand;

and in the trap at my feet
the rabbit leapt and prayed,
weeping blood, and crouched
when the light shone on the blade.

The sudden sun lit up
the webs from wire to wire;
the white webs, the white dew,
blazed with a holy fire.

Flame of light in the dew,
flame of blood on the bush
answered the whirling sun
and the voice of the early thrush.

I think of this for you.
I would not have you believe
the world is empty of truth
or that men must grieve,

but hear the song of the martyrs
out of a bush of fire-
“All is consumed with love;
all is renewed with desire.”