The Dusty Springfield Anthology.

Maybe it's the sultriness. The urgency in the gentlest whisper, the subtlety in her boldest proclamations of love, loss, heartache, and ascendancy. Maybe it's the way she can capture both the ecstasy of the afterglow and the despair of a breakup's aftershock. But there is something about Dusty Springfield that makes her contribution to pop music--hell, to life--particular, peerless. There are plenty of divas, plenty of blue-eyed soul sisters, but there is only one Dusty, and when I think about it there is no other singer who reaches me in so many ways so deeply as Dusty.

I'm not the only homosexual who feels this way. Although she's regarded in England as a national treasure with connections to both lesbian and gay culture that go beyond even Madonna's, her status in America is much like Laura Nyro's: Everyone of a certain age knows "I Only Want to Be With You," "The Look of Love," and "Son of a Preacher Man," yet those who go beyond the hits are rewarded with a body of work that spans decades, moods, musical eras. When she connects with material and musicians of her caliber--whether it's Burt Bacharach, R&B studio gi ants like, Arif Mardin and Thom Bell, or the Pet Shop Boys--the result is pop music with all the complexity and timelessness of high art. The fact that Aretha first turned down "Son of a Preacher Man," reconsidered when she heard what the English girl did with her Memphis crew, and still couldn't top Dusty's delirious delivery says it all.

In case you think I'm laying it on a little too thick, consider the splendors of this three-CD boxed set. Because of complex licensing arrangements involving a myriad of record labels, Dusty hasn't been able to have any kind of greatest-hits album in America for the last 30 years, and her U.K. box was an impossibly limited edition. But the result is well worth the wait: The selection and sequencing rarely falters, liner notes are both personable and informative, and the packaging is generous with bouffant-intensive, eyelineriffic photos that are marvelously melodramatic and capture the icon's glamour and grandeur at her peak of excessive elegance.

Starting with her early folky incarnation as one third of the Springfields, switching swiftly to her symphonic Anglo-American pop period, moving on to her unabashed R&B epoch, touching upon her mixed-bag late-'70s era, and rallying with her self-referential '80s rediscovery, the collection captures nearly all of Dusty's many shades. Although the third disc overlooks her classy but unjustly rare disco excursions in favor of two or three too many adult-contemporary indulgences, this monument to a monumental talent triumphs where most collections spanning nearly four hours flounder. While remaining incredibly true to her own sensibility and spirit, no other singer has as effortlessly proven that soul is not a matter of color or nationality but of feeling. Dusty knows not just the look of love but also its essence.