Selected Poems
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? Rainer Maria Rilke for June and Bronwyne, Aged care home-help None. But these come, grounded angels, more useful than the litany of winged messengers each religion offers. Always calm, always giving,...
Capture
The wind is wild through the olive trees, through the windows of the fast minibus, through my hair. Like on his motorbike, gripping him tight, engine revving uphill — I am a wind-vane in chaos. We head for Ezine and my long trip home, that intangible place, a shifting...
Disparities
I am sleeping in your sweet Leitrim air. Clouds of summer rain will gather, day ahead calm and lightly wet, enough to prompt the red, purple and saffron flowers in your window boxes into extra depth of colour, adding a bright polish only rain can give. Near...
The Gift of Leaving
Just when I have it by heart: that hip-swell of hill curving into Barr na ghaoith, Top off the Wind; each rolled smooth stippled stone of Boatharbour and Drimmeen beach; the stormy head of bay at Ceann Dólainn its sandy flesh ripe peach in the warm afternoon light; a...
The Waiting
Sea-rusted sun rising; night is a castaway in the yellow dawn, Everything depends opn the slant of light on your face this day, turned towards me or turned away. Waiting, choral filaments of breath, taut and silent, prepare the hymn my heart will sing; 'amidst...
Boned
Someone is tonguing the honeycomb of my spine, while I walk, while I sleep. With no familiar name like Age or Death, unknown, unexpected he has burgled access, and with his acid kiss, takes it on his lips like sherbet, fizzing to nothing. I didn't know to be aware. I...
Island Harvest
For Ruairí & Marie-Thérèse de Blacam, Inis Meáin suites and restaurant, Aran islands, Ireland eating periwinkles requires a harvest, back bent under a slate sky, seawater green as jade, wet sand sloping to the brack, Ruairí lifting weed, molasses-dark and heavy on...
Night Ravings
They dreamed the dreams of dirt, flailing, being buried alive in trenches bombed to splinters that shredded eye and bone. Silence made them edgy. Bombardment, thunderous and rattling, was the song by day and by night. Torrents of metal shards were new birds in their...
Coming of Age
They're not like lovers. After they've gone we don't breathe in longing uncovering the pillow, or burrow our faces searching for their scent in the hug of damp sheets. But we do let the stripped bed lie, its jumble of discarded bedding still guarding the imprint of...
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Poetry in volumes
Robyn Rowland’s poetry in her 12 volumes, has always struck for the heart. Open and honest in its emotion, her work is ‘a poetry of connection and communication’. Valuing accessibility, her books have been described as ‘generous and passionate’ with a celebration of the ‘immediacy of experience’ and the ‘poignancy of happiness’. Following an Irish tradition of the narrative lyric, her work encompasses the moments in life for which we need words; words to act as rituals that hold us.
In earlier books her themes included ‘the incompleteness, the unfinished edges of human love’ (Barrett Reid), death in its many forms; experiences of breast cancer and depression; language and silence; spiritual life. Robyn has also been exploring history through poetry, captured by the experiences of the individual in history. Her work in Turkey has given rise her two bilingual books: This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915, and Under this Saffron Sun /Safran Güneşin Altında translations by Professor Dr Mehmet Ali Çelikel.
Robyn Rowland
Author
Off the tongue
Shadows at the gate
Mosaics from the Map shows history is lived in the intimate experience. Personal stories explore war, change, family and friendship – in Ireland, Turkey, the Balkans and Australia. They touch on Cork, the city from which the poet’s family emigrated to Australia and where an Armenian created Hadji Bey’s Turkish Delight; Sarajevo, flowering now after a brutal war; Alcock and Brown and their pathway from POW camps to fly the first crossing of the Atlantic; Titanic with her very modern story; and Turkey, a country for blossoming friendships and love. The ephemeral nature of empire, its intersecting shifts, make up the map. Exile, belonging, love, loss and longing, are the grit that created the mosaic of these poems.
In 2019 Under this Saffron Sun /Safran Güneşin Altında was published by Knocknarone Press in Ireland. A book based in friendship and place in Turkey, it explores history, love and the similarities that bind people. Poems are again translated into Turkish by Mehmet Ali Çelikel.
Previously Line of Drift from Doire, contains poems that swing the reader between Ireland and Australia, the continuing tug of ‘belonging’. Three of her earlier books have poems reflecting the experiences of exile and belonging as a third generation Irish Australian, a theme that emerged in her second book, Perverse Serenity (a narrative sequence of a love affair with an Irish monk) and continued in a newer form in Shadows at the Gate (after living in Ireland for some time). Earlier still, her second book, Fiery Waters, contains some political poems, poems celebrating a love with a younger man, and a breast cancer sequence ‘The Great Way’.
Details are on this website if you look at the pages for each of the books. As Professor and Head of the School of Social Inquiry at Deakin University until 1996, Dr Robyn Rowland AO had an extensive academic career which you can view on the ‘Academic biography’ page.