Cirrus@Austlit

'Judith Wright is celebrated as a quintessentially Australian literary figure. Her poetry engages with the land, with her ‘white settler’ farming family and its problematic historical relationship to Indigenous people, and with environmental issues. Despite living almost exclusively within one nation space, Wright’s mental spaces included transnational exchanges. This chapter tracks one line of cultural influence involving an Australian religious movement with links to India, translations of Hafiz in England and the adaptation of a Persian poetic form, the ghazal, in Wright’s later work.'

Source: Abstract.

'Judith Wright was in search of reconciliation. She had long been searching for older cultural forms that could be made suitable to express modern Australian life, and, now, as her long writing life was waning, she was also in search of a new literary identity and a contemplative poetic form. One of the fruits of this search was Wright's decision to write a dozen of her last poems in the form of the ghazal, which is common to Persian, Arabic, and Urdu literature. These dozen poems are entitled The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals, and come at the end of Phantom Dwelling, published in 1985. In her Collected Poems, 1942-1985, these are the poems that are placed at the end of the book. In a sense, they are the terminus of her poetry; she published nothing more between 1985 and and her death in 2000. That the last sequence of Eastern poetic format, and specifically by Persian poetry and the work and thought of Hafez of Shiraz, is considerable. Her Shadow of Fire sequence thus stands as a very significant event in the history of literary transaction between  Australian and Persian cultures.' (184)