AustLit

'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)