Cover painting: Susan Barlow Clifton
Five Islands Press is distributed by the Australian Book Group,
To order a copy of the book email Robyn : rob.row2@bigpond.com
Reviews:
A generous and passionate book. The sensualist shines through: shrewd, empathic, intimate. Rowland celebrates the immediacy of experience, the poignancy of happiness. The poems are arranged almost seasonably and the natural world is an implacable metronome... the poems leave a sensation of warmth long after reading them.
Jennifer Harrison, Five Bells.
Rowland is a fluent, eloquent poet ... the sensually explicit lines skillfully manage their metaphor.. Her passionate political poems will give heart to many readers. There is ardour and brave candour in this celebratory stance.
Barry Hill, Poetry editor, The Weekend Australian, Books Extra, Review, March 30. 2002.
Both sensual and sensuous, it is concerned with the real world. Poems have a great personal intensity. She deals tellingly with a range of injustices around the world, always bringing out their human dimensions rather than simply wringing her hands. With no obvious stylistic or literary or political allegiance.. a talented woman writing directly and courageously out of her own experiences.
Geoff Page, winner of the Patrick White Literary Award 2002, review in Australian Book Review, March 2002. |
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Fiery Waters (Five Islands Press, 2001)
has six sections: ‘Life in the flesh’, ‘Tangled there’, ‘Time-travelling’, 'Bevelled edges’, ‘People place’, ‘The Great Way is not difficult.. ’
Themes are political, love with a younger man, traveling, spiritual awakening, and breast cancer.
Publisher Ron Pretty wrote: ‘ Rowland’s skill as a poet is to combine lilt with passion, musicality with social concern, clarity with depth. She has always had the ability to see the political in the personal, to see the world, not in a mustard seed, but in the space between two bodies, or the errant human cell. Fiery Waters fully deserved its success.’
A sample poem from Fiery Waters:
Young Men
The bodies of young men are firm and
brown all over, silky skinned they
smooth move like dolphins rolling
fluidic in the fluttering slip of sheet.
The eyes of young men are brown flecked hazel
when shirts the colour of new shoots in the apple tree
or the very green of apples themselves
float languid across their chests.
The hearts of young men are patient and calm
not furtive or selfish as the middle aged tell us,
they share, they say 'wait for me to help
I'm here and not hurrying away,
with me the job takes half the time and is half as heavy'.
The hands of young men are slow in loving
they have no sense of time hurrying us on
they do not hear the creaking tread of hours
along the hallway.
Their bodies have no need to rush
revelling in the flesh of women, wave on wave on wave
winding, twining their loving selves long into night into day.
The hearts of young men have been hurt,
they are not saved from pain by being young,
but have learned already loss and grief.
They too fear its sting
its long graze, deep spike,
leaving a dull ache long after the wound has healed.
The lives of young men have been touched by death
they know the souls of those drowned in cars in
the Brisbane River, of those with broken necks when
mistakes of judgement threw the bike too high, too wide,
too skewed it slewed straight into the winged claws of death.
The farewell of young men is sweet with kindness,
tender in parting, they look for friendship
after the body has cooled
and what remains is memory, the journey shared
that wandered back past the years to the wildness inside,
the girl, momentarily forgotten in the
weary tug and push of midlife routine.
Young men are not yet touched by age -
that's all.
Cover painting: Susan Barlow Clifton |
