AustLit

'‘Wonder’ is probably Rosemary Dobson’s second most favourite word. As David McCooey points out in his excellent introduction to her Collected Poems, her all-time favourite is probably ‘light’. Her poems are always well lit, often radiantly so, as befits a poet who began her creative life as a visual artist. But wonderment best expresses her poetic approach to the world. Her early poems, especially, are suffused by wonder as much as light. ‘Wonder is music heard in the heart, is voiceless’ she writes in one of those early poems (titled, in fact, ‘Wonder’) as the narrator of the poem stands, momentarily speechless, in front of a work by the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck. In another poem from the same book, ‘In My End is My Beginning’, it’s the first word in a list of what lies within the poet’s perceptual world...' (Introduction)