This dream of invasion and dismemberment reveals the hospitality required of literary figures and their families, as readers, scholars, and biographers probe spaces that, for those who live their lives away from the public eye, would be private and inviolate. It suggests the suppression of grief involved for someone in McKinney’s position, and the ways in which public interest may curtail personal mourning. The breaking body recalls Sylvia Plath’s macabre image of fame and distress in ‘Lady Lazarus’, with a ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ shoving forward to see ‘the big strip tease’, as a similarly broken body is viewed. For a ‘very large charge’, in all its senses, the crowd might steal ‘a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes’.

Capp understands the ethical implications of life writing, and she is aware of occupying a liminal space, somewhere between the prying strangers horribly magnified in McKinney’s dream, and those close to Wright. Responding to the implications of McKinney’s dream, she expresses the hope that her work does not represent a similar violation, and emphasises that her focus is on how landscape shaped Wright’s vision. Yet in the lines that follow, Capp admits to unease, aware that, although she dislikes what she calls ‘the grosser invasions of biography’, she ‘had intruded on [Wright’s] private life and there was no getting away from that’.

It is this liminal position, and this awareness of the uneasy work of any kind of biographical project, that enriches the book. As a young woman, Capp was inspired by Wright’s poetry. The idea that a poet might be a woman and actually alive excited the interest of a young writer brought up on English poetry. When Capp first wrote to Wright and sent her some poems she had written, she received an encouraging and generous response. She subsequently met Wright, who visited Capp’s school to give a speech. Later, a friendship developed, though it was a kind of literary friendship that Capp realises, in retrospect, was careful of its boundaries, despite moments of intimacy, such as Wright’s encouraging note when she learned of Capp’s pregnancy.

Most importantly, Capp did not know of Wright’s twenty-five-year relationship with H.G. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, which was central to Wright’s passionate life. Despite reading Wright’s lines such as ‘when I saw you / once again, what a joy set this pulse jumping’, a younger Capp assumes that the desire expressed by Wright, at the time widowed and apparently living alone, is nostalgic, expressing memories of her life with McKinney. Capp writes of her younger self’s presumptuous interpretation of her mentor’s life and writing, as well as of the projections and investments involved.

Capp’s exploration of Wright’s landscapes involves literal travels in the key places that inspired the poet. But since land, for Wright, was freighted with spiritual and historical significance, Capp’s journey quickly comes to encompass these layers, too. In New England’s scarred, magnificent tablelands, Capp finds the sudden vertiginous gorges shocking geographically, as well as for the atrocities against indigenous people that occurred there, as documented in Wright’s poetry. Similarly, Brisbane’s subtropical heat is the landscape of Wright’s falling in love with McKinney, and the tranquillity and flamboyant flora of Calanthe are symbolic of the burgeoning of Wright’s life as lover, mother, poet, and activist.

Capp’s attunement to the figurative is apparent elsewhere in her writing about the ocean. She is quick to see the metaphysical resonances of what she discovers on the journey, such as the coincidence of the progression of Wright’s hearing loss with her increasing openness to the ineffable. Yet there is a streak of self-laceration running through the work, which wisely precludes too easy an interpretation of the symbolic.

Because Capp’s guides on her journey are mostly Wright’s family, there is a quality of caution or deference in her exploration. This is at once ethical and slightly frustrating. There is sometimes a sense of intuitive connections that Capp would make, suppressed out of an awareness of the kinds of sensitivities McKinney’s fierce dream enacts. Yet in her tracing of the visionary nature of Wright’s insight into the ways that ‘something had gone profoundly wrong’ with our attitude to the earth, and the crimes of settlers against indigenous Australians, Capp’s book affirms Wright’s vision in compelling and lucid terms.