Woman to Man (poem)

"Woman to Man" (1946) is a poem by Australian poet Judith Wright.

It was originally published in Meanjin Papers in Spring 1946, and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.

Synopsis "The eyeless laborer in the night", of the first line of the poem, is the unborn foetus of a pregnancy that Wright would never experience, as she had been told as a teenager that she would never have children.The Unknown Judith Wright by Georgina Arnott, UWA Publishing, 2016, p242

Critical reception Writing on the Red Page of The Bulletin a reviewer commented that this poem "moves into midnight...and there, in a midnight which represents the darkness where the unborn child takes shape,...and the darkness of death, and the darkness of not-being in which the unborn embryo, dead at the beginning of its life-cycle...there in that midnight at once creative and destructive, the primal midnight of the universe, life and death wrestle in the book".

Publication history

After the poem's initial publication in Meanjin Papers it was reprinted as follows:

Australian Poetry 1947 edited by Frederick T. Macartney, Angus and Robertson, 1948 Voices : A Quarterly of Poetry, Spring 1948 Woman to Man by Judith Wright, Angus and Robertson, 1949 Modern Australian Poetry edited by H. M. Green, Melbourne University Press, 1952 A Book of Australian Verse edited by Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, 1956 The Penguin Book of Australian Verse edited by John Thompson, Kenneth Slessor and R. G. Howarth, Penguin Books, 1958 Five Senses: Selected Poems by Judith Wright, Angus and Robertson, 1963 Judith Wright : Selected Poems by Judith Wright, Angus and Robertson, 1963 Six Voices: Contemporary Australian Poets edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Angus and Robertson, 1963 Modern Australian Verse edited by Douglas Stewart, Angus and Robertson, 1964 A Book of Australian Verse edited by Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, 1968 Judith Wright : Collected Poems, 1942-1970 by Judith Wright, Angus and Robertson, 1971 The Penguin Book of Australian Verse edited by Harry Heseltine, Penguin Books, 1972 Australian Verse from 1805 : A Continuum edited by Geoffrey Dutton, Rigby, 1976 The Golden Apples of the Sun : Twentieth Century Australian Poetry edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Melbourne University Press, 1980 The Collins Book of Australian Poetry edited by Rodney Hall, Collins, 1981 Cross-Country : A Book of Australian Verse edited by John Barnes and Brian MacFarlane, Heinemann, 1984 The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Verse edited by Beatrice Davis, Nelson, 1984 My Country : Australian Poetry and Short Stories, Two Hundred Years edited by Leonie Kramer, Lansdowne, 1985 Two Centuries of Australian Poetry edited by Mark O’Connor, Oxford University Press, 1988 The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature edited by Ken L. Goodwin and Alan Lawson, Macmillan, 1990 A Human Pattern : Selected Poems by Judith Wright, Angus and Robertson, 1990 Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century edited by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann, Heinemann, 1991 The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse edited by Vincent Buckley, Faber, 1991 The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead, Penguin, 1991 Collected Poems 1942-1985 by Judith Wright, Angus and Robertson, 1994 The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse edited by Susan Lever, 1995 Bridgings : Readings in Australian Women's Poetry edited by Rose Lucas and Lyn McCredden, Oxford Uuiversity Press, 1996 Australian Verse : An Oxford Anthology edited by John Leonard, Oxford University Press, 1998 Two Centuries of Australian Poetry edited by Kathrine Bell, Gary Allen, 2007 Grace and Other Poems by Judith Wright, Picaro Press, 2009 Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature edited by Nicholas Jose, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Anita Heiss, David McCooey, Peter Minter, Nicole Moore, and Elizabeth Webby, Allen and Unwin, 2009 The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry edited by John Leonard, Puncher & Wattmann, 2009 100 Australian Poems of Love and Loss edited by Jamie Grant, Hardie Grant Books, 2011 Australian Poetry Since 1788 edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray, University of NSW Press, 2011 Love is Strong as Death edited by Paul Kelly, Hamish Hamilton, 2019

See also 1946 in Australian literature 1946 in poetry

References