See, in the circle how we stand,
As pictured angels touching wings
Inflame a Dutch interior
Bespeaking birth, foretelling kings.

The invitation to look with her, the evocation of a painting, the importance of signs and portents, are all classic Dobson gestures, while the verb ‘inflame’, insisting on its relation to the light of divine fire, takes a characteristically well-judged risk.

Many of Dobson’s earlier poems, such as the often-anthologised ‘Child with a Cockatoo’ or ‘The Bystander’, are about paintings, real or imagined. The loss of sight in old age is an especially cruel fate for one like her, to whom the visual arts have always been vitally important. Yet the poet is sustained by a sense of ‘what is due to the poetry’ – her way of describing her sense of vocation. ‘The Eye’, from her 1990 collection, Seeing and Believing, begins ‘One day the dark fell over my eye’, and goes on to describe, not loss, but a new presence, of moving filaments like ‘dark birds’ or ‘drifting, undeciphered omens’.

Such attentiveness is matched by other forms of discipline, which are needed in the face of the ‘wild confusion’ brought on by grief for the death of friends:

To force on the mind order:
Journeys taken on maps,

Attentive delving into

The roots of the language,
A search for the true invention
Of form by line in drawing.
(‘Grieving’)

Loss and grief can generate new works of beauty and power, such as ‘The Continuance of Poetry’, twelve poems in memory of her friend David Campbell. Here his poems appear as ‘stones, shells, water’, becoming messages to comfort his friends (‘The Messages’), and her memories of visits, conversations, books exchanged, become new poems.

Dobson’s poems of pregnancy and birth, too, draw generative power from danger, dread, and loss. Alluding to the death of their first child soon after birth, a poem dedicated to her husband begins: ‘Unknown, never to be known, lost.’ The line is repeated mournfully at the end of the second stanza but in the third it modulates into:

I hold you to my mortal heart
Since what is lost is always held.
Unknown, yet always to be known,
Lost, and so always to be loved.
(‘The Birth ii’)

In ‘Child of Our Time’ she writes of a mother’s apprehensions, drawing on images both ancient and recent: ‘I see the wounded moon, I fear / The travelling star, the mushroom cloud ...’ Here, like her contemporary Judith Wright, Dobson was exploring new territory in Australian poetry in the 1950s, the poetry of female desire, procreation, and creativity. These themes are especially prominent in her Cock Crow volume, published in 1965 after a ten-year gap during which she gave birth to her three other children and tended them in their infancy. It was a time when she sometimes feared she had no more poems to give. The title poem explores the conflict a woman may feel between her responsibilities to others and her desire to be ‘separate and alone, / Cut off from human cries, from pain, / And love that grows about the bone’.

Also present in Dobson’s oeuvre from Cock Crow onwards are portraits of people, including family members. ‘Amy Caroline’, a portrait of her grandmother, is echoed years later in ‘The Widow’ and ‘Who?’, poems about her mother that appear in the ‘Untold Lives’ sequence (1992). Here, too, are some small self-portraits: the child reading her first poem to mother as she pegs out the clothes; the girl in ‘The Green Years’, ‘a yard of pump-water. A long thin girl’. These autobiographical poems evoke her strongly female-dominated childhood and youth, as one of two daughters of a young widow; their mother supported the family, and provided for the girls’ education by working as housemistress at Frensham School, at the invitation of its headmistress, the innovative educator Winifred West.

Although she is known for her poems reflecting on paintings, and poems rewriting classical myths, Dobson is also a poet of the quotidian. The ‘Daily Living’ sequence from The Three Fates and Other Poems (1984) uses an elegant three-line stanza to play variations on themes of travel, arrival, and departure, greetings and farewells. It concludes with the memorable ‘The Nightmare’, dedicated to Christina Stead. Watching the old woman asleep in a hospital bed, the poet ‘dreams her nightmare for her’:

Suppose her smouldering thoughts break out in flame
Not to consume bed, nightdress, flesh and hair
But the mind, the working and the making mind

That built those towers which the world
applauds ...?

Poems in series like this, Dobson wrote, introducing her 1973 Selected Poems, ‘arrange ideas in relation to one another, as one might arrange objects in space to construct a harmony, each expressing something by itself and something else in relation to other objects’. This book’s beautiful cover image, taken from a still life painting by Jude Rae, might almost have been made in response to Dobson’s poem, ‘The Artist’s Wife’, which describes the process of meditation on relationships between ideas and objects that is evident in so much of her work. Of the painter Morandi she writes:

Exploring metaphysical ideas
of separateness, of joining, and relation
he painted, etched and drew for forty years
solely a group of pots upon a table.

Like this painter, Dobson explores ideas through contemplating ‘things of common use and custom’ or acts of dailiness, like folding the sheets. The late ‘Poems of a Marriage’, too, convey the translucence of simple things and actions, which nevertheless carry unbearably poignant emotion. ‘Empty Spaces’ recalls a time when the house was always crowded with objects and people, but now is empty of children; as well, ‘you, oh you / Who were always with me, / You, gone, too’. Now, living alone:

I can cross this room
From any direction
To the single chair
The single bed.

The book concludes with a selection of the ‘poems from poems’, which Dobson made out of literal translations from the Russian of works by Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and others. These she worked on over a period of years with David Campbell, and together they published Moscow Trefoil (1975) and Seven Russian Poets: Imitations (1980). The selection was made by Dobson’s daughter, Lissant Bolton, who explains that the poem ‘Translations under the Trees’ refers to this fruitful collaborative work:

Poems blow away like pollen,
Find new destinations,
Can seed new songs
In another language.

Lissant and her brother Robert (whose photograph of the poet appears on the back cover) are among the many family and friends thanked by Dobson in her Preface. She pays tribute to her late husband, Alec Bolton, for his support for her writing, to her mother and her teachers for their encouragement, and to friends for enhancing her life. It is characteristically graceful and generous in tone. David McCooey contributes a succinct and perceptive Introduction to the volume, celebrating almost seventy years of poetry which ‘is compelling because of the artful way that it flickers constantly between clarity and originality, communication and surprise’, poetry which is ‘both austere and humane’.