Five Senses (2012)

Five Senses - Five Poems of Judith Wright (2012, revised 2013)

The common themes of my Judith Wright cycle are transcendence through direct experience of the Australian landscape intertwined with a passionate need for a sense of place and belonging. These are illustrated and reinforced by universal mythological associations drawn from various cultures. Sometimes deceptively simple and spontaneous, Wright's poems engage with a diversity of philosophical ideas that range between the abstract, symbolic, metaphysical, and the personal and inyimate. Forming my own relationship to each poem was a profoundly enriching experience. I was encouraged to compose the cycle by Jenny Duck-Chong who, having sung all of my vocal music within her range, asked for more. She previewed songs from the cycle with Bernadette Harvey at a concert of my work at the Sydney Conservatorium in May 2012. The following year Greta Bradman and Leigh Harrold presented the complete work at the Encounters Festival in Brisbane. 

Song, from The Two Fires (Collected Poems 1942-70)

This powerful poem in the form of a mandala was composed at a time when Judith Wright and her husband Jack McKinney were reading widely in Eastern philosophy. The dancer is Shiva, Vedic Lord of the Dance and reconciler of the physical world of illusion with timeless eternity. Creator, destroyer and preserver, Shiva performs at the still centre of the cosmos surrounded by the "blazing wheel" which symbolises universal pain and suffering. He is dancing to release humanity from this "bright periphery" and so transcend the endless cycle of birth and death. 

To a Child, from the1953 collection, The Gateway, is a visionary poem. The Australian literary scholar Sister Veronica Brady has observed that Wright, in the words of Blake, had the capacity to "look not with her eyes but through them." She seems to have retained from childhood this clarity of vision which, in by-passing the snare of the subjective, could illuminate the strange realities beyond. The poem's astonishing imagery reminds us that the workings of Nature are miraculous: the "bush of fire" is perhaps intended as a symbol of renewal. 

The Lost Man is also from The Gateway. Through a succession of startling symbols, some with apparent Christian associations, others distinctly Pagan, it probes the mystical depths of a rainforest, where primordial forces act upon the trappings of our civilization, effacing the ego and revitalizing at first hand our involvement with nature and the spirit of the earth. 

The Forest, from Collected Poems, expresses a yearning to enter a realm of timeless contemplation and strip away time-worn symbolism to reveal underlying truths. The flowers are strange until they are names, classified, and consigned to ordinary consciousness. 

The final poem, Five Senses, is a poetic description of the creative act - weaving, or spinning material originating in te unconscious and stimulated by the power of the combined senses to produce an irresistable "rhythm that dances and is not mine". To me, the poem expresses a glowing, almost Hasidic surge of joy which I've tried to convey in my setting. 

Five senses was commissioned by my friend Matthew Sandblom to commemorate the life and work of his late father, Eric Sandblom, conservationist and music lover, who dedicated his life to serving the community. 

Ross Edwards