Five Senses gathers work from across the early and middle years of Judith Wright’s career, one of the defining voices of twentieth-century Australian poetry.

Wright writes with an unusual balance of clarity and intensity: landscape, memory, love, and history are always something felt through the body and the land.

Her poems often move between intimacy and country—human relationships set against the Australian environment, where beauty and violence sit close together. Alongside this attentiveness to place runs a deep ethical current: Wright was one of the first major Australian poets to confront colonial history and environmental damage within lyric poetry. 

This selection offers a compact entry point into Wright’s most enduring poems and the sensibility that made her central to modern Australian literature.