Dr Robyn Rowland AO.- Press information

Robyn Rowland’s fourth book of poetry, Shadows at the Gate, was launched with a reading to sustained applause at Adelaide Writers Week in March 2004. Similar responses were heard at Norfolk Island Writers and Readers Festival in July and in Ireland at the book’s launch in April. After her reading at Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Eileen Batersby wrote in The Irish Times: ‘Memory, anecdotal narrative and strong emotion shape Rowland’s strong, personal and well-crafted verse.’ Her reading was ‘honest and questioning’ and ‘Irish history filters through her story as told in appealing, unsentimental but humanly touching poems.’

In 1996, Robyn was diagnosed with breast cancer and burnout, a diagnosis that led her into major life changes and a change of path from a vigorous international academic life to one of greater solitude, contemplation and a return to the writing of poetry.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, as Professor Rowland Robyn was Foundation Head of the School of Social Inquiry at Deakin University (1993 - 1995) and Foundation Director of the Australian Women’s Research Centre.(1990 - 1996). She had founded three women’s studies programs and worked tirelessly over 20 years for women’s rights.

As a researcher she had published 3 academic books, delivered over 100 papers and wrote 60 book chapters and journal articles on women's’ issues, women’s health, mothering sons, reproductive technology issues and human rights. Her work was notable for its accessibility and scholarship.For over 16 years Robyn had been involved in international debates concerning reproductive technology and genetic engineering. She was a well known public critic who brought the debates about the ethics of reproductive technology into the public arena with her extensive press work, including television and radio.

During this career Robyn addressed, among others, the House of Lords, London and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She was a Guest of the Quebec Government at its gathering on legislation in these areas, and various governments, internationally and nationally, used her work in the development of legislation on topics such as the keeping of donor records, surrogate motherhood, genetic screening and in vitro fertilisation. In 2000, she was invited to Portugal by the Luso Americana Foundation as an international specialist to address the issue 'The Human Condition 2000'.

In the 1996 Honours List Professor Rowland was made an Officer in the Order of Australia by the Governor General on behalf of the Australian Government for her contribution to women’s health and higher education and her contributions nationally and internationally in her field.

After cancer, life changed. Robyn turned inward, beginning a Buddhist path of reflection and meditation practice. Being a single parent, her attention turned to her young sons, aged almost 3 and 5. For two years she wrote and read nothing, entering as she called it in a reflective article written for the Age, ‘The great silence of my life’. Finally, she reemerged into the poetry world. With two previous poetry books in print, she now published Fiery Waters, containing many love poems and works covering political issues such as rape and the stolen generation and travelling through the experience of breast cancer itself. The poems have been described by the Worchester Review as dealing with ‘sensual, erotic and heterosexual themes in a startlingly honest way’.

Fiery Waters was well received and almost sold out in its first 12 months.

Now comes her fourth book: Shadows at the Gate. During the last 20 years Robyn has made frequent trips to Ireland, following her Irish heritage. During 2001 and 2002 she spent over 8 months living there on the wild and isolated coast of the Connemara. During that time The Twin Towers were attacked, the war in Afghanistan began, and her deepening links with the land of Ireland and its people and spirit made issues of exile and belonging that had been obvious in her third book, a painful tension in the new work. On returning to Australia unsettled she also experienced deep depression and the need to end the relationship she had with a priest in Ireland that was captured in Perverse Serenity and finalised in Shadows. And constantly, the spectre of cancer hovering through the work. This is a powerful new work, with a maturing of form and a passion and clarity to the grit of lived life that only poetry can bring to bear. A powerful reader and performer, Robyn Rowland’s poetry and readings are accessible, deeply moving and inspirational.

Of Robyn Rowland’s work, her publisher Ron Pretty writes:

‘ Five Islands Press published her third collection, Fiery Waters, in 2001. That book had both critical and commercial success. It sold out its print run, and received a number of reviews, all very positive. 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.

As well, she is a poet who does not stand still. Her new collection, Shadows at the Gate, retains the music and the passion, but there is something new here too. There has been, in the writing since the previous book, a tightening of the line, a moving towards a greater conciseness, without, it should be stressed, any loss of the music. Shadows at the Gate moves between Ireland and Victoria, between the twin towers and the love of a priest, between selkies and grandfathers with great assurance and insight. There is something European or perhaps Irish in her poetic consciousness: she handles passion and laughter, politics and loss with equal confidence. Her work is very sensual and encompasses a broad range from the political to love affairs that go astray, death and cancer.

I know Robyn is working on various issues concerning the Irish diaspora at present, as one of her continuing themes in her poetry is exile and belonging.She is third generation Irish and has spent a great deal of time in Ireland, living there for a good part of the last two years. Her second book Perverse Serenity is a book length narrative sequence about a love affair with an Irish monk, the termination of which is contained in very moving poems in her fourth book. Most of the poetry in Shadows at the Gate is set in Ireland.’

Critics have described her work thus:

Filigree in Blood was ‘powerful and commanding’, ‘with that degree of integrity which makes one pay attention’.

Perverse Serenity was ‘writing not afraid to be vulnerable, not trapped in literary artifice, not reticent about emotion’ - Barrett Reid

Fiery Waters was ‘a generous and passionate book’ celebrating ‘the immediacy of experience, the poignancy of happiness’ with ‘the natural world .. an implacable metronome..’
Jennifer Harrison

‘Rowland is a fluent, eloquent poet.’ ‘There is ardour and brave candour in (her) celebratory stance’
Barry Hill, The Australian

.. hard to slot into the frame of contemporary Australian poetry (Rowland) holds no obvious stylistic or literary or political allegiance. Both sensual and sensuous (Fiery Waters) is concerned with the “real world”’, here is ‘.. a talented woman writing directly and courageously out of her own experiences.’
Geoff Page.

‘These passionate, lively and sensual poems develop and unfold freely, with a great naturalness and charm.There is a lyrical freshness and a discursive fluency without false notes or strain.’
John Jenkins.