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Lock your warm hands above the chillingheartand for a time I live without my fear.Grope in the night to find me and embracefor the dark preludes of the drums begin,and round us, round the company of lovers,death draws his cordons in.This poem serves to introduce us to the prevailingmood of her second volume. Womanto Man. Love is a recurring theme in these andlater poems. At first it begins as the love betweenman and woman; later it takes on amore transcendental quality—love, the movingforce of all life. Just as the landscape poems,wherever they occur in the flow of her poetry,are peopled with personal memories or derivations,so her love poems have a deeply personalquality. It is doubtful whether any aspectof what she says in the title-poem of thisvolume has ever been better said and a greatdeal would be lost were it not quoted in full:The eyeless labourer in the night,the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,builds for its resurrection day—silent and swift and deep from sightforesees the unimagined light.This is no child with a child's face;this has no name to name it by:yet you and I have known it well.This is our hunter and our chase,the third who lay in our embrace.This is the strength that your arm knows,the arc of flesh that is my breast,the precise crystals of our eyes.This is the blood's wild tree that growsthe intricate and folded rose.This is the maker and the made;this is the question and reply;the blind head butting in the dark,the blaze of light along the blade.Oh hold me, for I am afraid.The tv/o poems which follow this, "Woman'sSong" and "Woman to Child", and anotherlater in the book, "The Unborn", are complementarypieces. They serve to estabhsh thefact that the physical "love" of which shewrites here, distinct from the more transcendental"love" to be found in many otherpoems, is always that of the woman. It is thelove for the child she is to bear; it is neverthe passionate love that men feel and write of,never the pursuit and the capture. Nor is itromantic love which is the subject of manypoems, most of them by men and some bywomen aping men. In this respect her attitudetowards love is similar to that of Mary Gilmore,although its expression is usually moreintense, more poetic. There are other similaritiesbetween these two women poets, notablyan emotional drawing from the well of thepast, an awareness of the significance in ourhistory of the displaced people, the aborigines(although here Mary Gilmore's poetry is farmore emotive) and a strong sense of commonhumanity. But there are sharp differences, too.Both are feminine, but Mary Gilmore is sometimesalso feminist, a characteristic never tobe found in Judith Wright's work or her personalattitudes. Nor does she espouse causes orchampion the underdog. And nothing could bemore out of character than to imagine MissWright rushing off to join a socialist colonyin Paraguay or anywhere else!Many poems in this second volume makereference to children: "Child in Wattle Tree',"The Child", "The World and the Child","Night and the Child". All these are to somedegree the result of an intense awareness ofthe impingement of age upon youth, part ofthe duality which is stressed in many otherways in other poems: light and dark, real andunreal, life and death. In "Lost Child", a sectionof the closing sequence of poems in thisbook, she gives a hint of the metaphysicalrealms she is to explore more frequently andat considerable depth in later volumes:Is the boy lost? Then I know where he isgone.He has gone climbing the terrible crags ofthe Sun.The searchers go through the green valley,shouting his name;the dogs are moaning on the hill for thescent of his track;but the men wiU all be hoarse and the dogslamebefore the Hamilton's boy is found orcomes back.Through the smouldering ice of the moonhe is stumbling alone.I shall rise from my dark and followwhere he is gone.I heard from my bed his bugle breath go byand the drum of his heart in the measure ofan old song.I shall travel into silence, and in that fiercecountryWhen we meet he will know he has beenaway too long.46 WESTERLY, No. 1, MARCH, 1968