![]() Zwicky’s next book, Kaddish and Other poems, showed both her talent with dramatic personae and the use of other voices in the exploration of the centrality of family and forgiveness. Its tender counsel to ‘nuzzle your snouters, sweet/sons and daughters’ capped off with an ironical aside “They’d be mad to trust women/After this.”, reveals a covert feminist framing never idealogically simplistic but hemmed with an ambivalence acknowledging reality’s limits. Her work is spring-loaded, even in a seemingly innocent description of the parenting duties of the male sea-horse. Duty for her is not a straightforward business, but a process continually assessed and calibrated against tradition and individual reciprocity. Zwicky’s first book, Isaac Babel’s Fiddle (1975) set out her principal concerns, her moral stance in relation to duty and obligation action and contemplation. She left the concert stage in 1965 and returned to literature, though the interconnectedness, complexity and theatricality of classical musicianship provided an artistic template which continues to inform her writing. She began publishing poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, thereafter working as a musician, touring Europe, America and South-East Asia. From early in life she trained as a pianist, performing with her violinist and cellist sisters while still at school. Her father was a doctor, her mother a musician. Fay Zwicky was born in Melbourne in 1933. ![]()
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