| Summary: | Dorothy Hewett´s poetry follows a complex architecture, a structure which
encompasses her personal beliefs and the guiding lights that consciously and
unconsciously led her life, while it also draws and deploys core elements from the
literary tradition of Western culture. The primary image that pervades her poems is the
garden, which is either the place where many of her poems occur or a significant
component in others. Hewett´s garden retains several of the characteristics of the
primordial garden, such as innocence, abundance and placid solitude, but it also
partakes of its Romantic nuances, which, after all, are the same as in Eden but enhanced
by feeling and intensity. The garden as literary locus sets the pace of Hewett´s poetry in
that it links myth-making with literary tradition, the pillars that sustain the body of her
poetic reality. This triangle, myth, tradition and reality, incorporates the main topics that
the Australian writer inscribes in her work, and, while each corner retains its thematic
substance, it also reflects the other two, thus giving unity to the whole poetic process.
As Bruce Bennett pointed out as early as 1995, "place, appropriately conceived, is a
meeting ground of mental, emotional and physical states and as such is a suitable focus
for the literary imagination" (Bennett: 19).
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