The love of art, antiquity and mythology are in Dobson's poetry from the beginning. Endymion, Botticelli, Mars, Prometheus, Daphne, van Eyck, Brueghel, Icarus, Raphael, Giotto, Calvi, Vermeer are but some of her early passing parade of artists and mythical figures. In Child with a Cockatoo there is a group of fifteen 'Poems from Paintings' (her favourite device is poems in series) and of them 'Paintings' emphasises her conviction of the supremacy of Art over Time:
Climate of stillness: though I hear
No sound that falls on mortal ear
Yet in the intricate, devised
Hearing of sight these waves that break
In thunder on a barren shore
Will foam and crash for evermore
And you, grave Florentine, who turn
And look at me with eyes that burn,
I hear you asking - 'What is Time
Since Art has conquered it? I speak
Five hundred years ago. You hear.
My words beat still upon your ear.
'
Many of her poems - 'Still Life', 'Young Girl at a Window', 'Over the Hill', 'In a Cafe', 'Painter of Antwerp' - are themselves word paintings, capturing moments of existence frozen in time. Personal experiences - family ties, wife and motherhood - take precedence in Cock Crow, with 'Child of Our Time', 'Out of Winter', 'Annunciations', 'To Meet the Child' and 'To a Child', for example, being sensitive and deeply poetic expressions of maternal love. 'Cock Crow', the title poem, portrays the dilemma of divided loyalties - those owed to others and that owed to oneself. Self appears, briefly, likely to prevail:
And walking up and down the road
Knew myself, separate and alone,
Cut off from human cries, from pain
And love that grows about the bone
It is only a momentary resolution. The daughter-mother 'love that grows about the bone' has the final claim.
In the sequence 'The Devil and the Angel' Dobson displays a deft touch of whimsy and fantasy with the Devil and an angel competing for the souls of those departing from this life. There is a similar captivating jauntiness in 'The Sailor: May 1960', which tells of a sailor, tired of the seafaring life, shouldering his oar and marching inland, across the Great Divide, through many a 'one-horse town' and on across the vast inland stock routes until finally he is asked 'What's that, mate, tied up on your back?' There he stays, his journey ended. Ruefully the poet proposes making a similar journey with a gun on her shoulder.
Several of Rosemary Dobson's smaller books of poetry have been published by her husband Alec Bolton's Brindabella Press - Officina Brindabella - Three Poems on Water Springs, Greek Coins: A Sequence of Poems, The Continuance of Poetry and Untold Lives. Greek Coins comprises twenty four-line poems each of which sets out 'a visual idea which could be contained within a circle - that is, within the coin-sized four line stanza'. The poems, accompanied by her own line drawings, reflect her attachment to Greek themes, love of antiquity and admiration for the wisdom and perception of the Greek traveller Pausanias, who wrote a guide to Greece in the second century ad. Over the Frontier contains a section 'Poems from Pausanias', which includes the Greek Coins poems. The Continuance of Poetry (1981) contains another small series, twelve poems written after the death of fellow poet David Campbell. Simple, restrained poems, they recall pleasant times of friendship, returning often to the belief that those shared moments live still, in memory and in the continuing presence of Campbell's poetry. The Continuance of Poetry is contained also in The Three Fates and Other Poems, as is another poem of friendship, 'A Letter to Lydia', which moves beyond the personal to echo again Dobson's love of the classical past and the ancient lands, Greece and Crete. There is, in her later poetry, the occasional measured glance at approaching death and a sharper awareness of mortality but her joy and wonder at the treasure still to be gleaned from art, poetry, the loveliness of nature and the continuing miracle of life are undiminished. While there is life there is direction and purpose.
Learn still; take, reject,
Choose, use, create,
Put past to present purpose. Make.
The Collected Poems, chosen from her earliest ('I have stood by the poet that I was') to her latest volumes, brings together about 200 poems written over half a century. They represent, as has been aptly said, 'a life-work of love and dedication to the craft of writing'. If that craftsmanship has often led to her classification as a poet's poet, the unassuming tone, lucid style and honest, direct presentation of her work make her also a reader's poet. Recognition of Rosemary Dobson's poetry has accumulated over many years. She won the Sydney Morning Herald Award for Poetry in 1948 for 'The Ship of Ice', the FAW Christopher Brennan Award in 1978, the Patrick White Award in 1984, the Grace Leven Poetry Prize in 1984 and shared the Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 1985, the last two with The Three Fates. She was made an honorary life member of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and AO in 1987 for her outstanding contribution to Australian literature.
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