Judith Wright (1915-2000) remains a giant figure within Australian art, culture, and politics. Her 1946 collection of poetry, The Moving Image, revolutionized Australian poetry. She helped to establish the modern Australian environmental movement and was a key player in early campaigns for Aboriginal land rights. A friend and confidante of artists, writers, scholars, activists, and policy makers, she remains an inspiration to many. And yet, as Georgina Arnott is able to show in this major new work, the biographical picture we have had of this renowned poet-activist has been very much a partial one. This book presents a more human figure than we have previously seen, and concentrates on Wright's younger years. New material allows us to hear-directly, thrillingly-the feisty voice of a young Judith Wright, and forces us to reconsider the woman we thought we knew. *** "Thoroughly 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation, 'The Unknown Judith Wright' is unreservedly recommended for community and academic library Literary Studies collections in general, and supplemental studies reading lists in the subject areas of: Australian History, Art, Poetry, Gender Studies, Literary Criticism, and Biographies." --Midwest Book Review, Library Bookwatch: January 2017 Subject: Australian History, Art, Poetry, Gender Studies, Literary Criticism, Biography]

Knitting together two fascinating but entirely distinct lives, this ingeniously structured braided biography tells the story of the lives and work of two women, each a cultural icon in her own country yet lesser known in the other's. Australian poet Judith Wright and Canadian painter Emily Carr broke new ground for female artists in the British colonies and influenced the political and social debates about environment and indigenous rights that have shaped Australia and Canada in the 21st century. In telling their story/ies, this book charts the battle for recognition of their modernist art and vision, pointing out significant moments of similarity in their lives and work. Although separated by thousands of miles, their experience of colonial modernity was startlingly analogous, as white settler women bent on forging artistic careers in a male-dominated world and sphere rigged against them. Through all this, though, their cultural importance endures; two remarkable women whose poetry and painting still speak to us today of their passionate belief in the transformative power of art.

Judith Wright (1915–2000) is one of the best-known Australian poets of her generation. Born into a pioneering bush family, her commitments to environmental protection, history writing and obtaining recognition for First Nations people drew her in new directions and assumed a major role in her life. She was the first president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, a founder of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a member of the Aboriginal Treaty Commission. This selection of her nonfiction, the first of its kind, brings together essays, speeches, family history, correspondence, memoir and criticism to reveal the personal and philosophical threads that bind together her work and life. It makes plain the shifts and transformations in her thinking, and the female friendships – in particular, with writer and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal – that opened her to new perspectives and connections. This addition to the Australian Thinkers series shows what happens when a poet talks about a nation. It reveals a way of thinking about Australia – its land, history and culture – that draws on the best of human possibility.

All chapters with Aboriginal content annotated separately.

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid's Tale "brings a swift, powerful energy" to this "intimate and immediate" poetry collection (Publishers Weekly). These beautifully crafted poems -- by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate -- make up Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word. Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.