Essay Database

Judith Wright's second anthology Woman to Man (1949) is better known for the freshness of her approach in examining until-then taboo subjects of sexual desire and especially women's sexuality. Such economical though passionate poems as Woman to Child and Woman to Man, apart from confounding thousands of adolescents in their final school-year examination papers, provided a new language for exploring the sacredness of sexual union, pregnancy and birth. Even these poems, considered by many among the …

…culture: 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. (Bora Ring) Or, in the case of Nigger's Leap, New England, the lament is for an historical massacre. What increasingly enters her poetry from the fifties onwards is focus on the impact of colonisation on the souls of the conquerors: "I'm a stranger come of a conquering people."