When Mary Gilmore, ardent socialist and Dame of the British Empire, died in 1962 at the age of ninety-seven, her standing as a public figure was one rivaled by few Australian writers before or since. If forcefulness of character and the indefatigable prose with which she had championed--in letters, journalism, and essays--the causes of social reform, Australian identity, and Australian writing played a considerable part in that reputation, her poetry was also an essential component. Apart from some six hundred uncollected poems in journals, she had published eight major collections between 1910 and 1954, as well as a Selected Verse (1948). Influential critics--H. M. Green, T. Inglis Moore, and Robert D. FitzGerald--had placed her among Australian poets worthy of note, even if giving her preeminence only as "Australia's best woman poet." Yet, by 1988 her biographer, W. H. Wilde, could describe her poetry as virtually unknown apart from a few anthology pieces. Not...