Birds | Judith Wright #AUSpoetry

_{Whatever the bird is, is perfect in the bird...}

_{…Whatever the bird does is right for the bird to do –}

Birds | originally from The Gateway, 1953

Birds: Poems by Judith Wright is a lovely illustrated hardcover 60th anniversary edition of Wright’s 1962 collection which includes an introduction from her daughter, Meredith McKinney plus six more bird poems from other collections.

The illustrated artworks are taken from the National Library of Australia’s Picture Collection and include renowned nature painters such as William T. Cooper, Neville Cayley, Ellis Rowan and Lilian Medland. The cover image is a detail from Neville W. Cayley’s Red-capped Parrakeet (Purpureicephalus spurious) circa 1930. My only quibble with the book is how all the illustration credits are listed together on the last page of the book in one long continuous paragraph making it very difficult to find the details about the artwork illustrating the poem you’ve just read.

I tend to read poetry collections very slowly – one at a time, often rereading all or bits of some before moving onto the next. I like to let certain images sit with me for a while. I also like to jump around, looking for subjects I’m interested in or that appeal to my mood at the time of reading.

The first poem, simply titled Birds, is one of the ring-ins from an earlier collection and sets the scene perfectly. We are reminded that ‘weapon kestrel….cruel kestrel‘ who is compared to the gentle ‘thrush round as a mother‘ and the shrieking ‘parrot clinging and quarrelling‘ are all simply doing what they do best as birds. And it is for this reason that we love them. If only humans could also be ‘as simple to myself as the bird is to the bird.‘

I then jumped to p34 and Magpies which was accompanied by Neville Cayley’s Magpie (1901), simply because I love magpies.

And now thanks to Judith Wright I will always think of them with ‘hands in pockets‘ as they walk down the road ‘like certain gentlemen/who seem most nonchalant and wise/until their meal is served‘. Which is exactly like the magpie who follows Mr Books around when he is whippersnipping the back block of our home in the mountains, nonchalantly walking beside Mr Books, swinging his head around, until he spies something wiggling in the newly exposed ground and pounces!

Although currawongs have quite a pleasant call, they do look rather thuggish. Wright’s description ‘he is a gangster, his wife’s a moll‘ had me laughing out loud.

Dove-Love was startling with its savage imagery, moving from ‘the dove purrs – over and over the dove/purrs its declaration‘ taking me instantly back to my childhood Easter holidays in Bellingen, visiting my grandparents. To the harsh reality of

...but still the dove
goes insistently on, telling its love
      “I could eat you.”

And, in captivity, they say, doves do.
Gentle, methodical, starting with the feet...

Thankfully I have never seen a pair of doves in captivity! I’ve only ever heard them in the wild, if one call the streets of Balmain and Bellingen wild!

There is one street in Balmain that has a nesting pair of doves and I love walking that way to work so I can hear them and remember Bellingen. For me the sound of doves are nostalgic and gentle. They remind me of a simpler time and place and bring my Pop in particular into my daily life again even though he hasn’t been with us since 1986.

On a recent visit to Bellingen to show Mr Books the house my Nan and Pop used to live in, we were standing under the shade of the street trees as I explained the changes that had been made by the new owners, when a pair of doves began calling. I almost cried.

After all this time, I wasn’t sure if my memory of dove calls and Bellingen was real (mum had no such recollection of doves and her home town). To have it confirmed in such a way was validating and curiously cathartic. ‘My heart was full‘.

I have been trying to find a way to describe this moment – what it meant, and still means to me, to have this tangible connection between now and my childhood. It was more than nostaglia (although the deep feelings I had for my Pop in particular are a part of it). But this is not some kind of romantic hankering or longing for my childhood years. I do not think of my childhood years as being some kind of idyllic time that I would like to revisit. It was not unhappy, but it was a lonely time. It’s something more.

Then today I read the penultimate chapter in Rachel Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch and she (and George Eliot) told me exactly what this is (my underlinings).

_{…our earliest experiences provide the ground upon which our characters are built….There is nothing particularly special about the landscape of our youth, she says, except for the important fact that it is where we learned to be human.}

_{…Loving something of where one comes from – and having emotional access to that love – is a moral imperative for Eliot. It is to be in touch with the kernel of one’s character, one’s most receptive self. For Eliot, being sensitive to one’s memories of childhhod is a sign of moral maturity.}

I’ll take that! Somehow, the sound of doves cooing brings me in touch with the very foundation stones of who I am and taps into the ‘intense capacity for emotion that a child experiences.‘ A poem about doves can take me there too.

But I think my favourite (this week) is Egrets. The sense of stillness, peace and awe in this small poem struck a chord. I suspect that for Wright this was her special poem, her special bird moment that stayed with her forever.

Once as I travelled through a quiet evening,
I saw a pool, jet-black and mirror-still.
Beyond, the slender paperbacks stood crowding;
each on its own white image looked its fill,
and nothing moved but thirty egrets wading –
thirty egrets in a quiet evening.

Once in a lifetime, lovely past believing,
your lucky eyes may light on such a pool.
As though for many years I had been waiting,
I watched in silence, till my heart was full
of clear dark water, and white trees unmoving,
and, whiter yet, those thirty egrets wading.

Birds is Wright’s personal, reflective collection that evokes a similar response upon her readers. We all have our own experiences and memories of certain birds that these poems bring to life. By capturing such precise details and describing the mannerisms of each bird, Wright allows the reader to bring to mind the birds that they know intimately, finding their own connection through her words.

This 60th anniversary edition is a beautiful object in its own right combining images and words, imagery and art in a thoroughly satisfying way.

If you would like to see more photos, or more importantly, listen to the birdcall of our Australians bird, please visit Graeme Chapman’s extensive library here.

• Read for The 1962 Club with Simon & Kaggsy and AusReading Month.

ISBN: 9781922507327
Imprint: National Library of Australia
Published: April 2022 (originally published 1962)
Format: Hardback
Pages: 88 
Dates Read: 9 October - 17 October 2023

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life recognises the continuous connection to Country, community and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and they are this nations first storytellers.