Why Wright will endure

In 1956, A Book of Australian Verse, edited by Judith Wright, was published by Oxford University Press. Her choice of her own poems included ‘Bullocky’ and a couple of others, the over-anthologising of which, at the expense of her other work, was later understandably to provoke her exasperation.

Reading them again today, in her Collected Poems, pleasure is not diminished by familiarity. The 426 pages of her work in this new edition confirm her position as the richest and most rewarding of living Australian poets.