Cover painting: Lynda Burke
Five Islands Press is distributed by the Australian Book Group,
To order a copy of the book email Robyn : rob.row2@bigpond.com
Reviews:Silence & its Tongues. By Robyn Rowland. Five Islands Press. Reviewer: Geoff Page
In her new collection, Silence & its Tongues, as in her two preceding books, Fiery Waters and Shadows at the Gate, Robyn Rowland reveals her emotions with convincing, if sometimes disconcerting, directness. While some poets resort to mythical figures and various personae to suggest their feelings, Rowland goes straight to the real details of the issue and lets them stand for themselves. As with her earlier books, there are several poems here about love seized and love frustrated but at the core of Silence & its Tongues is the poet's mother who died from cancer in 1990, a disease Rowland herself has also had to battle.
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Reviews of Silence & its tongues.
Five Bells Winter.
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Antipodes.
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Island July 2007.
Click here to read the full review
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Silence & its tongues (Five Islands Press, 2006)
Fired by a yearning for communication, the poems in
Silence and its tongues grow from experiences of
loneliness, absent love, the silent world of
depression and the complex issues after a
mother's death, into the peace of silent
meditation and the strength of friendship. They
comfort in their honesty and their urgent need to
find meaning, crafted from strong metaphor, a deep engagement with landscapes in Ireland and
Australia, and a lyrical instinct.
Much of Robyn's work has evolved around issues of
exile and belonging. But this new book does not dwell on
exile. It is a book that moves from experiences
of intense loneliness, through 'the Dark'
of depression and into the light. It contains the
confronting dual-sequence 'Dead
Mother Poems', dealing first with the death of a
mother and the caring by her daughter; then the
realisation 15 years later of the burden of that
relationship for the daughter and the effect of
depression in the mother who was both invasive
and rejecting.
Powerful in its evocation of anger and
forgiveness, Beverley Farmer in launching the
book said:
'These poems are at once homely, stark and surreal
(and in that they are true to the nature of grief, in my
experience). There's the indomitable mother who is going
under, decaying before our eyes, her past
unforgotten and unforgiven, her future cancelled out.'
And there's the daughter, the hurt and angry child
and the betrayed young woman and the older and yes,
wiser newly pregnant woman in whom the future is
embedded. They are so alike.
The very words in our mouths come from our
mother. Her death is her last gift. Short or
long-drawn-out, the death struggle is not ended
when she dies, it is just cut short, leaving us
empty-handed. Old demons never die, and while we
live, our mothers lurk in the background, in the
limbo that is memory.'
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the powerful
emotional context of Robyn's work, this book, as with
the previous book, have been described as
'deeply consoling.
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