Poetry
Woman to Man
Judith Wright · 1949
Synopsis
Forty-four poems. In the one that gives the book its title, a woman addresses the man she loves: the child they are conceiving has as yet neither face nor name, a blind workman labouring in the dark, a third presence in their embrace, hunter and prey at once, a folded rose born of their blood. Then come, according to the contents page, a woman's song, poems about two sisters, twins, a drinker of methylated spirits, a blind man, the cycads, a night after the bushfire, a flood, an old prison and the dust of a small town.
Context
The book was published in Sydney by Angus and Robertson in 1949, in fifty-seven pages, three years after a first collection published with the support of Clem Christesen. Some of the poems had first appeared in the journals Meanjin and Southerly or in the Bulletin. The collection received the Grace Leven Poetry Prize that year. The title poem, in four stanzas of five lines, speaks of conception in the first person, from a woman to a man.
Who it is for
Fifty-seven pages in English, in short pieces; the language is direct and the poems can be read without commentary.
Prizes and reception
For a critic in The Age, in 1953, beautiful and evocative poems, nourished by a strong awareness of being the one who makes.
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