Environmental educator Alison Elvin shares with us three significant Australian poets whose words of life and land speak to her: 'Poetry often encapsulates for me thoughts, feelings or events I’ve experienced and struggle to express concisely. Through my life I’ve felt a deep connection with many of the poems each of these three women poets have written about their own lives and perceptions.'

Alison shares the way poetry arises for her out of time – a moment in the day or a season or a historic reality. Her beautifully chosen sequence of Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson and Mary Gilmore shows how small poems can open us onto much larger vistas.

Sources:

‘Sonnet’, The Moving Image: Poems, Judith Wright, Meanjin Press 1946             
‘Being Called For’, Collected Poems by Rosemary Dobson, Angus & Robertson 199

 ‘Nationality’, The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore Vol 2 1930-1962, ed. Jennifer Strauss, UQP 2007