Judith Wright is a poet of resonant plainness. Much too plain in the past, for my taste—but her two recent books [Alive and Fourth Quarter] suggest that she is verging on new shores of amazement. This is partly horror at the efficiency with which her fellow-countrymen are raping their country and partly the intensity of growing old. Hymning a good wooden house and its familiar and loved objects, she asks, 'Who'd live in steel and plastic/corseting their lives/with things not decently mortal?' The decency of mortality is a theme she exploits with great richness….

English readers could gain insight into the ambiguous nature of Australia by reading Miss Wright's poems. All Australian poetry tends towards the condition of nature poetry, and her unemphatic accounts of the innocent terrain and its contending overlords are excellent guides to the continent. From insects, creatures and simple rituals...