Steep Curve
$25.00
‘Heartachingly beautiful, wistfully wise and meticulously crafted’, 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)
Among his achievements, with the Lions Club and volunteers, Norm Rowland OAM founded Warrigal in 1967–8, the continuing not-for-profit aged care facilities in the Illawarra and beyond, working voluntarily with them for over 55 years. He was also Superintendent of Tallawarra Power Station and developed anti-pollution fabric filters for power stacks. Born during the use of the crystal radio, he skyped with his daughter Robyn every day to chat. Faceter of precious stones, furniture maker, fisherman, bowls champion; parts only of his story emerge in this book.
“Steeped in Irish song, schooled in bush ballads, and enchanted by Australia’s Eastern coastline, Robyn Rowland comes into the stony territory of grief with a poet’s toolkit as sharp, as refined, as subtle and silken with use as only the finest carpenter could boast. In the “puzzle-maze of caring” for her centenarian father, the reader follows Rowland’s supple, breathtaking lines into the onslaughts of old age, and further—into the lives of butterflies, birds, dragonflies, flowers, fig trees, and even the feral cats of coastal life. On apricot sands, under moonlight, at the bony ends of a beachscape, or attending to the leaking legs of her father, as he goes into “the oldest certain dark,” Robyn Rowland never shirks from the details, the hard facts, the sting of the sublime. Steep Curve is a book of remarkable moments and enduring love."
- Kevin Brophy
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