Notes on Human Experiences and Concepts

Time

Any critical understanding of Rosemary Dobson's poems requires reading to and fro across adjacent poems; to and fro in the group of poems, and into the wider series in which each poem is meticulously placed.

A.D Hope's phrases 'radiant vision' and 'contemplative erene' as the 'distinctive mark of Rosemary Dobson's poetry',  yety there is included at times the spirit troubled, grieving, or in anguish, even within the confidence found in advancing 'with music', 'intent and tranquil', towards that frontier with eternity.

In tracing a spiritual ethos, recognition of the polysemic nature of the language; awareness that stillness, being stilled, or silence, predicate metaphysical insights or illumination of understanding; and awareness of the physical and the sensuous being linked through metaphor to the metaphysical, are each important.

Perspectives

Disruption of the discourse of poetry is most evident in syntax  and prosody, but more significantly in the way the lines of tension in traditional paradox or contradictions are resolved to new conceptualisation to shift the parameters of dialectic.

A significant example noted by Hope is the traditional antithesis of time and eternity being resolved to 'time presented within the order of eternity'. Thus for the spirit, being in temporal experience is being still within and part of the order of eternity.

The sudden shift from the Hellenic vision to war is theoretically startling. The poet works assuredly in her new systemic conceptualisation, going her own way. The note of death feared in its finality is gone from the poetry of 1948 onwards.

Australian Context

Fay Zwicky recently expressed the view that in the absence of a "recognisably unified literary tradition" the one thing that has drawn Australian poets together "has been as strong attachment to the physical environment,  the strange and often harsh beauty of an ancient land" (34). At the same time she sees this as a source of conflict for many of them, since such attachment to the land seems to stand in fundamental opposition to their cultural heritage, "for the most part European in origin."

For Rosemary Dobson such a conflict might not be expected to be an inherent part of her writing. Her debt to this cultural heritage is obvious and she has repeatedly acknowledged it, most recently in the "Preface" to her Collected Poems (1991). In fact her work is sometimes regarded as largely confined and defined by it, which has earned her the somewhat dubious labels of "classicist" (Tulip 45; Mitchell 4; Strauss 342), and of "miniaturist" (Malouf 17; Goodwin 144).

Diane Fahey called her "a poet's poet" but also characterised her art as an "implanting and nurturing one" (38), and the author herself has propagated and practiced the notion of cultural cross-pollination: 'I had, and have, a very strong belief in translation as a means of cross-pollinating literature, and furthering the 'exchange of cultures'" ("Imitations" 97). In her anthology Australian Voices (1975) she deliberately included work "that reflected a concern for, and interest in, events else-where in the world, since I believe that literatures are enriched by such exchanges between countries."

If Wright's poetry, as Dobson recalls, disclosed to Australians fresh aspect of truth about "the heart" of their land ("A World of Difference" 382), for her this land retained its secrecy. Commenting in 1962 on Australian painters' representations of gum trees, she subtly conveyed her sense of distance, if not alienness: the gum tree, she wrote, "testifies to the fact that this secretive landscape... provides sustenance for those who, through centuries of nomadic life, have learned the ways in which it gives and withholds."

Assumptions

Yet Dobson's writing is more concerned in many ways with land, habitat and the idea of environment, both physical and cultural, that is often recognised. At the same time, her representations of Australian landscapes are both selective and mostly unlocalised: a bay; a dry river; a ghost town; a rain forest. We might note, too, that the two archetypal sites of Australian (male) identity-making, the bush and the desert, do not figure in her poetry. Nor does she attempt to write the shadowy "other" which is such a prominent feature of Wright's poetry.

To encounter and name the landmarks is, rather, to remember with respect and affection the great and small human dramas of lived experience acted out through generations on this piece of land which the speaker herself has left.

Again, the land is not constructed as a signifier, to be read or decoded for the hidden message, rather, precisely because it's not itself a text, authored or inscribed already, it seems to enable those who face it openly to have different perceptions, to convince figurative analogies for other dimensions of reality than those of the surveyor, mapmaker and settler. Having not only received but presumably read the poems of Li Po, the speaker is ready to perceive and articulate fullness of meaning in a landscape from which the hermit, the enabling (culturally determined) spirit of place or signifier, we might say, is tellingly absent - an instance of poems seeding new songs in another language.

Style

Dobson's "refined or austere approach to things..." carried a "sense of discretion and reserve." Ivor Indyk describes "a great sense of clarity and decorum" while Chris Wallace-Crabbe admires "the steadiness of her poetry." Peter Rose who in his capacity as editor of Australian Book Review published some of Dobson's most recent poems, emphasises "a real finesse and sustained quality."

Implicit in this a kind of steady observation capable of watching the movement of light and the small things lit; and the larger sense of concentration and the the visionary. Within light's mobility and through its refractions McCooey finds a quality of haunting in the poems, concerned as they often are with "the half-seen, the ghostly, and the half-understood."(xvii)

Implicit in this account are motifs of loss, courage (her mother's, bringing up two children alone, and her own, as a child losing a parent), generosity and recuperation which can be traced through her poetics.

Reimagining / Reframing

The place of translation in Dobson's work opens into a more figurative version of the question. As the etymology suggests, translation (from translatus, past participle of the Latin word to convey) and metaphor (a word tangling back through the French word metaphore, itself from the Latin metaphora - carrying over - and the Greek metaphora) are closely related.

The idea of movement between - an investment in the littoral - is at the heart of Dobson's practice. Dobson's ekphrastic poetry enacts a kind of crossing between visual and literary forms, while her work with the Russian poems collects several kinds of crossings. She and David Campbell worked with a number of translators (Olga Hassanof, Robert Dessaix and Natalie Staples) to achieve the work of bringing the poems into English versions, something involving and transcending translation in its literal sense.

The translation of grief is a reminder  that any austerity in Dobson's poetry works like the politeness McCooey recalls, to disclose rather than to create distance. It is as though a stepping-back from a more confessional "I" opens the mysteries of the loss into an expression of something more inclusive.

Rosemary Dobson's poetry trembles with the mysteries that we glimpse in our deepest experiences. She is a poet of the epiphany, but a self-effacing one, so that disclosure is framed by reticence that does homage to the mystery - the "elusive" parts of expression that mean that the poet is burdened and freed by "the doomed but urgent wish to express the inexpressible", as she once put it. Her craft crosses and recrosses to the edges where light comes up from darkness, and where its refractions are always in flux, moving through shadows to discover 'words of wonder'.

Paradox

Rosemary Dobson is a curiously problematic writer - paradoxically, because of her work's apparently unproblematic nature, its lucidity, its monumental quality. In a time of profound anxiety, not just about ways of living and surviving, but also about language, its power and worth, she dreams still of a common language which is clear, inclusive and evocative, concentric rather than eccentric, and concerned to escape from the cramp of mere subjectivity. Australian, nevertheless she invokes the 'great names, to me the strange / Names of a culture still to be explored' and looks 'for ways by which to understand / My origins; for ground whereon to stand / With poetry for a divining-branch' (The Three Fates, 28).

The resistance here to having parameters set for her is characteristic. Paradoxically, however, it springs from a reluctance to define or assert herself - a reluctance evident also in the dismissive 'what might be termed' and 'and so on' when she comes to speak of the last group of poems, in which she is at her most vulnerable and moves to declare herself most openly. But it is characteristic also of much of women's writing in general, the writing of the 'colonised'. Working within male discourse - as a poet Rosemary Dobson is often bracketed with her friends A.D. Hope and David Campbell, and with Douglas Stewart and James McAuley with whom she figured in the late 40s and 50s in the Bulletin - her poetry nonetheless works, quietly but powerfully, to deconstruct it and to write beyond boundaries. Comparison of her renderings with David Campbell's in the series of free translations from the Russian of poems by Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstram makes this clear. As A.D. Hope notes in his preface:

'David Campbell, it seems to me, descends like the eagle of Zeus on the poem he is to render, and with something of the Olympian lightning flash he carries it off and transmogrifies it: it becomes a poem in his manner... Rosemary Dobson ... works in quite another way. She flows round and over and through the poem until it is totally absorbed into her ... personal habits of language, of rhythm, of feeling; and then, with delicate care and exquisite adjustment of detail the poem so dissolved is encouraged to re-crystallise itself in the medium of another language and another poetic personality.'

Values

In this sense to read Dobson's work in the active sense is the miss the point. The task we are engaged in here is rather to cross over the frontier, to learn to listen, to catch a glimpse of that 'outline of non-existence' which 'can be held by the inner eye' ('Always moving, it assumes the shape of stillness'). What matters here, that is to say, in art as in life, is some quality of pure answerability.

Many of her early poems 'Young Girl at a Window', 'The Fire', moving in Mist', 'Foreshore') rely on this tactic, embracing contradiction and ambiguity as a way of life. But there is also a certain self-consciousness about them which reflects the weight of commonsense, of the masculine interrogation which insists on categorisation, proximity and rationality, the principle of non-contradiction.  (Longfield note - Dobson is subtle in her critique of the phallogocentrism (male / logic and reason dominated thinking) of her context and contemporaries.)

In many of her poems we glimpse Dobson as a possibility of being another kind of poet, ecstatic, dionysan, sweeping away limits and restrictions, working language, defying syntax, re-defining herself and her world by defiance. But this kind of poetry can fall subject to another kind of ideology, and claim absoluteness and exclusiveness as patriarchal thought also does. Dobson's great gift, however, is for truthfulness and integrity, for remaining in contact with daily experience and thus the common language. Refusing to live by presuppositions, suspicious of prejudice and cliche, she leaves herself open in her work to honest criticism on the one hand and the possibilities of change on the other. This is the importance of her poems about paintings. They kept her in touch with what is already given and sensuous and thus enabled her to use this as a measure of, and sometimes a judgement on, the present. Personal space in life, irony in art, depend upon the possession of some internalised standard of this kind. Writing poetry may be the most innocent of occupations, but in this sense it is highly subversive, setting personal experience against the collective representations of things, confirming her existence in the world in her own terms.