The Three Fates and Other Poems by Rosemary Dobson

Sometimes I’ve written reviews ‘because I was invited’, or felt I should. But this is a book I really want to review. And I wasn’t invited: I applied for the job. For close on thirty years I’ve been grateful to Rosemary Dobson, especially for her third book, Child with a Cockatoo (1955), the one through which I came to know her work. Her latest, despite obvious continuities, gives a rather different kind of pleasure, and new reasons for gratitude. A while back she wrote to me about something of mine, saying she was glad I’d aimed for a ‘spare style’, the one she herself preferred. The spare style, of course, like any other, has its dangers. You can be just too spare, at worst thin and flat, offering a map of experience rather than the country itself re-made in language. James McAuley, I think, was too often a map-maker, whereas Judith Wright and Hope at their best confer grants of land. In her previous book, Over the Frontier, I thought Rosemary Dobson herself had gone in for rather too much map-making. Not so in The Three Fates and Other Poems. Plain diction again, the ‘naming of the creatures’ with little use of simile or metaphor. And yet the spareness gives us, now, a vivid sense of the creatures, and beyond that a sense of the perceiver. And if the poetry is transparent it’s not like a pane of glass: instead, clear water, perhaps, which shows the stones on the stream-bed ... or better, the sunlight that calls out the colours and spaces of a familiar land and sea-scape which on another day would look different, even dull. Such poetry is easier to appreciate than to define: try to touch the sunlight, and see what happens. In many of these poems there’s an almost Chinese clarity, and some are explicitly influenced by Chinese models: notably the sequence for David Campbell, ‘The Continuance of Poetry’, written after his death in 1979. Though I must add that the influence is thoroughly assimilated: made over and made new. We walk along the dry bed of the riverIn the sand the fallen needles ofshe-oaksIn the air the smell of dry resinA few white clouds curling in thesky ...Not being able to find the hermithe wanted to visitLi Po looked deeper into thelandscape.Like Li Po we lean against apine-tree;And looking into the landscape findyour poems. As for the eye of the beholder: it takes, more often than before, I think, a grave look at the signs of mortality, but it can also be wry, as Bruce Beaver has said of the title poem. And here and there it can be a quietly satirical eye as well. ‘Museums, I said, / Have little regard / For the affection I bear them.’ In one museum in China she sees, through a half-open door, ‘white-wash, stepladders / And empty wall-space’, while ‘a devoted curator’ on the threshold describes ‘in detail / Ad infinitum / The objects not there’. Some readers will regret that there’s nothing in this book that quite matches the affectionate verve and humour of that well-known early poem ‘Country Press’, but the sign-off piece, ‘The Stone Circles’, has something of the same gusto, bringing together the standing-stones of the ancients with the huge towers of Sydney: Stripple Stones and the Top ofRiley,Kirkslight Rig and Drizzelcombe,The Three Kings and the MerryMaidens,Bogton Mill and Cauldside Burn.’…National Mutual, Royal Insurance,Centrepoint and T & G,Caltex, Philips, Hilton, Esso,QANTAS, ANSETT, M L C. For me at least, the poems which stand out beyond the others in a fairly even collection, pleasurable throughout, are those which look squarely at the truths of death and ageing, and do so without self-pity but with much compassion. The death of her friend David Campbell has touched and strengthened Rosemary Dobson and her work. She’s at her best in visits to the hospital and the nursing-home. At the same time, the verse-letter of her Greek friend Lydia, with its praise of friendship and of the art and the two countries they both love, is guarantee of the fact that she is not just sitting on a tombstone: living and dying are equally her concern, and the continuance which poetry embodies. This is nowhere more clear than in the sequence ‘Daily Living’, in such diverse poems as ‘Folding the Sheets’, ‘The Letter’ and ‘The Friend’, and, above all, in two poems there: ‘The Nightmare’, about (I think I may say) Christina Stead in old age, and ‘Visiting’, about her mother and herself. The stick, the fan, the basket, themorning paper,But first the task – hymn-books tobe gatheredAfter the morning service. There’san old girl playing‘Jealousy’ from sheet-music at thepiano,(‘I make my fingers work. It’s thearthritis.’)I walk with my mother outsideround the garden.Some rage simmers in all of us allthe time.I know her rage as mine. ‘Oh, theseOld women –’ she says, as though amutinous girl …Daily she tells me of her troubleddreams.I listen. Could not bear to tell hermine. Here, as in many other places, the eye is sharp for the telling and terrible detail, but without belittling anything: giving a sense of value not futility. And the spare style is at its strongest, reinforced by the delicately strong rhythms of the lines. As an object in the hand, this book is pleasing too. Hale and Iremonger have, as usual, done their author proud, with clean white paper and strong (delicately strong) type-face, though the ampersand on the front cover strikes me as shouting too loud. As against this, the back cover gives us a magnificent photograph of the author by Max Dupain.

Philip Martin

From the New Issue

Three recent short story collections

The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

Saving Lieutenant Kennedy: The heroic story of the Australian who helped rescue JFK by Brett Mason

‘Rinbo Abdo’, a new poem by Philip Mead

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