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A Human Pattern: Selected Poems, by Judith Wright. Carcanet Press. $23.95.
Hard to categorize these poems, which trace Australian writer Judith Wright's development from her first book, published in 1946 when Wright was thirty-one, to her last collection in 1985. It's tempting to say that Wright (1 915-2000), a near contemporary of Elizabeth Bishop, started out colonial and ended up post- colonial, were it not for the thorny question of whether the descendants of European settlers in countries like Australia and Canada can claim postcolonial status. By "colonial" I mean that Wright's early- to-middle poems sound a lot like the Romantic and post- Romantic (but still pretty Romantic) British poets she'd have read in school - Blake, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats - without a scrap of Marianne Moore's vivifying Modernism or Bishop's meandering, associative, probing descriptions. The seven quatrains of Wright's snake poem, "The Killer," might owe something to Emily Dickinson:
The day was clear as fire,
the birds sang frail as glass,
when thirsty I came to the creek
and fell by its side in the grass.
................................
He has vanished whence he came,
My nimble enemy;
And the ants came out to the snake
And drink at his shallow eye.
Still, if the corseted stanzas, with their inversions and apostrophes ("O move in me ..."), have a whiff of the hand-me-down, Wright's subjects are brand new. As Heaney reveals rural Northern...