Selected Poems
Burnt Words
‘Black Saturday’ was named for a series of 400 bushfires in Victoria Australia, around 7 February, 2009. 173 people died, 414 were injured, 2,100 homes destroyed, 7,562 people were displaced. Wind was never useful in a poem, but flame, now, yes flame was the core –...
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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.