A Human Pattern introduces the full scope of Judith Wright's poetry to British readers for the first time. Work published in successive volumes since 1946, the most recent collection in 1985, is included. Judith Wright comments:

'Since over all those years I have been concerned not only with literature but with questions of what’s called 'conservation', and human, especially Australian Aboriginal, rights, it also serves as an introduction to my preoccupations with these questions now so much more urgent than they were in earlier years.'

What distinguishes Judith Wright's poetry is its assured range, not only of form (from traditional metrical verse to powerful free verse) but of theme. She is a passionate poet, a poet of authoritative philosophical meditation and argument, and a spirit alive to her world and its depredations at the hands of her own people. Her landscapes are vibrant with natural and human history, her social conscience nourished by a sense that man has brought the Fall upon himself, and still has - to a diminishing degree - the power to reverse it.