…This book dexterously captures the humility, grace and wisdom a daughter divines in tending to an ageing, then dying, father. (Dr. Anne Casey) Her father almost 100 and well, the poet returns from Ireland. Initially his companion, then carer during covid, she lives with him for over 2 years in the house he built 65 years before. Their relationship grows through physical and emotional challenges, frustration, anger, grief and love. Loss of her life in Ireland drives reflections on place and ‘home’. Past poems for her father are interleaved as ‘Backspaces’. Drawn together in an intimacy few daughters or fathers experience, comfort for the poet lies in a practice of observing daily ‘one lovely thing’ and the loving purpose in caring. Heartbreaking and tender: this is the poetic narrative of their shared journey. Robyn Rowland comes into the stony territory of grief with a poet’s toolkit … and never shirks from the details, the hard facts, the sting of the sublime. (Dr. Kevin Brophy)

It remembers passion. … It can make us alive to something new or remembered. Coming out of the ordinary or the mystical, it calls us to ourselves; drawing into view the inner working relationships between the conscious and the unconscious; the passionate intensity of the feeling life as well as the corrugated pathways of thought. Using image to speak, it inspires awe at the way the poet can condense experience on the page…. Poetry can inform, renew, move, uncover understanding, create change’.

Robyn Rowland, ‘De-lyricising the lyric?’