SOURCE: "The Genius of Judith Wright," in Westerly, No. 1, March, 1968, pp. 42–51.

Using his review of The Other Half (1966) as an occasion to write a retrospective of Wright's career, Ewers traces her development from regionalist to universalist, and concludes that she is a mystic with a poetic voice.

Before attempting to come to terms with Judith Wright's latest volume, The Other Half, I propose, first to take a brief sampling of what critics and reviewers had to say about her earlier work as it appeared, and then to examine it in more detail as a whole. This will enable us to establish her poetic background, to mark some common factors to be found in all her poetry and the differences that emerge from time to time.

Much credit is due to C. B. Christesen, editor of Meanjin in which a number of her poems had already appeared, for publishing...