Patricia Dobler, Collected Poems, Autumn House, 2005, ISBN# 1-932870-05-9

The new Collected Poems of Patrica Dobler is hefty only in the number of striking, well-crafted poems it contains. The book, published by Autumn House Press, shows a poet of great skill. Thankfully, Dobler avoids both the popular tendencies of overwrought confessionalism and hygienic rhetoric. When Dobler writes, it is both an exercise in craft and a communication to the reader.

Dobler, who died last year, is not as well known as she should be. She published only two full-length collections of poetry during her lifetime. At the time of her death, she was assembling another collection. Collected Poems contains all the poems from her previous two books, along with her uncollected and unpublished work. It is a stunning collection.

Her poetry is concerned with the commonplace. The people she writes about are the every day characters from her life. In poem after poem she brings the reader into her world. Whether she is writing about her fear of being lost, "with only/foreign money in her purse" or of "Alaska with its fifteen kinds of snow in June," Dobler is a master of transforming the ordinary world.

Seldom is a collection published with such sharp attentiveness to the mundane. Dobler is a domestic poet in the same way Thomas Hardy is. She is concerned with love and loss, with sickness and transcendence. She is a poet who knows well " the emblem/between the damaged/and the damaged."

In her fine, but too brief, introduction Jean Valentine describes Dobler by quoting James Merrill's description of Elizabeth Bishop "as someone impersonating an ordinary woman." In so many of her concerns, Dobler does seem ordinary. She writes of her divorce, her travels, her children, and her mother's illness. It is in her mastery of craft and in her courage to push past easy answers that Dobler is never less than satisfying and very often extraordinary.

Dobler is a poet who is aware of the power of poetry. She knows:

There is, and for everyone,
a final room to enter,
a single room to which
each of us is drawn.
The poet she loves best has said,
"Great misfortune simplifies."
The next poem tells you how to live.