Judith Wright: the Complexity of Design207

a On Australian Poetry and Poets: Longer Views on Individuals 329 in which the wish to do so can be expressed in the act of writing the poem, if the material failure to do so is the remembered reality. In a poet as experienced and professional as Andrew Taylor, you could make an endless list of those he has read and admired. There are clear influ- ences on Taylor’s work, but many of them come from visual art, music, and especially the experiences of cultural difference. It’s a complex portrait. But for me, the ability to place the idea and image together, to think and see at the same time, brings most to mind the Wallace Stevens of “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”: Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun. Consider Taylor’s cathedral poems, especially “The Windows”: Windows are the invention of fire in glass our story burns at the sky light lives in the eye the eye itself held in a wall knocks endlessly Nature (fire, sky, spirituality) in tension (the window) with the constructed world (the cathedral, religion) – neither being independent of the other. Andrew Taylor’s Collected Poems presents a life as a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are constantly being added, and though the images are clear as the pieces go into place, we are never sure what the picture will end up looking like. An innovator and a maverick, as he continues to add to his life’s work, he will keep us guessing, though offering firm clues as to how to follow him on his journeys. Judith Wright: The Complexity of Design207 LL HUMAN LIFE WORKS OUT OF PATTERNS, makes patterns, and leaves its mark, its imprint, to some degree or other. Judith Wright A (1915–2000) wondered at and investigated the complexity of design with a secular vision but a spiritual intensity. More than five decades of writing and thinking led her to feel that though all people had patterns in com- 207 “Introduction” to Judith Wright, A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (1990; Man- chester: Carcanet, 1992): xvii–xxvii. 330 S PATIAL R ELATIONS a mon, not all people considered or used these patterns (consciously and uncon- sciously) in just ways. The poem is a pattern, the land is a pattern, ‘flora’ and ‘fauna’ are patterns, society and communal groups are patterns. We are monadic and dyadic at once. And choices are made. The poem is a pattern and an exercise in free will. But when the distance between how we live in an environment and how we respect that environment grows too great, those patterns are disrupted, and become self-defeating and damaging to the networks of patterns that coexist to make the world that is. Although her poetry and world-view were so centred not only in Austra- lian landscapes, flora and fauna, but also in the idea of Australia with its mass of contradictions, affirmations, and negations, Judith Wright was truly a world poet. From her pastoral origins on the family station in the New Eng- land tablelands, through days near coast and rainforest in Queensland, and finally to her much-loved inland acreage in the bush outside Canberra (at Braidwood, New South Wales), Wright looked inwards into Australia, and in doing so made the local poetically universal. Her dedication to place and, as her life went on, increasingly to environmental concerns and Indigenous rights was part of a life-dialogue with her origins and their implications in her writing. One cannot separate Wright’s poetry from a political agenda, even in her earliest poetry, which is less compensatory, less prone to self-critical conside- rations of her world as made by her family, and families like hers; of the de- structive effect of ‘pioneering’ on the peoples whose land was stolen, and of the damage done to the ecology of those places. But Wright is a poet in whom all aspects of the human condition are pres- ent in even the most scathing analysis of human greed and foibles. A poet of apparent formal conservatism in equal strength to her political radicalism, Wright needs to be formally re-read if one is fully to understand how much she was actually pushing the limits of formal diction and prosody in order to say what she felt needed to be said. It is true that later in her life she expressed doubt about innovative poetics, but this probably came out of a sense of ex- clusion and maybe out of a suspicion of being misread in her dynamism. Wright was an innovator in the way she wrote about flora and fauna. Al- though she separates human and animal causality, her poems so often consider not only the rights of animals themselves but even the complexities of writing animals within the constraints of the poem itself. Here, she often uses form in a self-ironizing way, subjecting the persona to the agency of the animal being discussed. In “Platypus” (an animal exploited in life and in lite-.

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