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So grown you looked, in the same unalteredroom,so much of your childhood you were alreadyforgetting,while I remembered. Yet in the unforgettingdreamyou will come here all your life for renewaland meeting.It was your breath, so softly rising andfaUing,that kept me silent. With your lids hke budsunbrokenyou watched on their curtain of your life, astream of shadows moving.When I touched your shoulder, I too had alittle dreamed and woken.It may be said that Judith Wright, howeverdeeply she feels, however much she is movedby the transience of life or the eternal questfor its underlying truths, will never and cannever be dogmatic in her statement. A briefpoem, "Wishes"- gives her answers to the questions:What do I wish to be? What do I wishto do? To the first she replies, "I wish to bewise". To the second, "I wish to love". Thefinal couplet admits the contradiction:To love and to be wise?Down, fool, and lower your eyes.There are several remarkable poems in thisvolume. The title-poem is yet another attemptto bring about some reconciliation of oppositeswhich we have noted before. This time theopposites are "the self that night undrownswhen I'm asleep" and "my daylight self", thesubconscious and the conscious. She bringsthem tentatively together again in a finalcouplet:So we may meet at last, and meeting bless.And turn into one truth in singleness.We should perhaps have noted earlier thisrecurring practice of summing up in a coupletthe ideas that the poem has been exploring.In this she is not uniformly successful. Thereare times when one feels that in her desire toround off a poem as neatly as possible she hasyielded a little to rhetoric, a little to emotion.In this couplet I have quoted, one may wellwonder whether these two opposites can bereconciled in singleness.The outstanding poems in The Other Halfare "To Hafiz of Shiraz", "Naked Girl andMirror" and the New Guinea sequence, "TheFinding of the Moon". I name these threebecause of certain intrinsic differences aboutthem, but would not suggest that any othersin the volume fall short of the high standardof thought and expression that characterize allJudith Wright's verse. She is, it seems, too finean artist ever to write a bad poem; if somereach greater heights than others it is becauseinitially they are aimed at greater heights."To Hafiz and Shiraz" is prefaced by thestatement- "the rose has come into the garden,from Nothingness to Being", which reminds ussomewhat of an earher poem, "Dark Gift". Itsphilosophical theme is the inevitability of fruition,so that it is no longer "any poem" thatmight follow her pen, but the certainty that inpoetry, as in living:Every path and life leads one way only,out of continual miracle, through creation'sfable,over and over repeated, but never yetunderstood,as every word leads back to the blindingoriginal Word."Naked Girl and Mirror" must take its placeamongst Judith Wright's finest poems. It is areflective essay on the problem facing an adolescentgirl whose body once served only theelemental needs of childhood, but is nowawakening to the fuller needs of maturity andlove. This she sees at first as a betrayal andis afraid. She longs to return to what she was,but finally realizes that she cannot do this, althoughshe still hopes to retain something ofher original self:Let me go—let me be goneYou are half of some other who may nevercome.Why should I tend you? You are not myown;you seek that other—he will be your home.Yet I pity your eyes in the mirror, mistedwith tears;I lean to your kiss. I must serve you: I wiUobey.Some day we may love. I may miss yourgoing, some day,though I shall always resent your dumb andfruitful years.Your lovers shall learn better, and bitterlytoo,if their arrogance dares to think I am partof you.In the New Guinea sequence, "The Findingof the Moon", she captures to an extraordin-50 WESTERLY, No. 1, MARCH, 1968