Robyn Rowland – July 10 2016

Dry July is an alcohol free month to raise funds for people affected by cancer.

Robyn is a poet and academic writer. Prior to her breast cancer diagnosis in 1996, she was an international social science academic and researcher bringing debates concerning the ethics of reproductive technology and genetic engineering into the public arena. In addition to her academic texts, Robyn has written nine collections of poetry including Perverse Serenity, Shadows at the Gate, Seasons of Doubt & Burning: New and Selected Poems and Line of Drift. As a third generation Irish Australian, her poetry often explores issues of exile and belonging and more recently, she has explored the individual in history through poetry. Her work in Turkey resulted in This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915. Robyn is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, former Professor and Foundation Head of the School of Social Inquiry at Deakin University and the Foundation Director of the Australian Women’s Research Centre, also at Deakin. She was made an Officer in the Order of Australia for her contribution to women’s health and higher education and her contributions nationally and internationally in her field.

Fiery Waters
Five Islands Press, 2001; ISBN 9780864187351
Fiery Waters, Robyn’s second collection of poetry, contains some political poems, some poems celebrating a love with a younger man, and a breast cancer sequence ‘The Great Way’. Topics dealt with include loneliness, transience, love and loss. It describes the plight of Dorothy, a firefighter who lost her life in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fire. It includes the award-winning poem ‘The Ache’, which considers the existence of an aged shearer. As a poet, Robyn’s themes include ‘the incompleteness, the unfinished edges of human love’ (Barrett Reid); death in its many forms; breast cancer and depression; language and silence; spiritual life. She writes ‘a poetry of connection and communication’.

Silence & its tongues
Five Islands Press, 2006; ISBN 9780734036483
Fired by a yearning for communication, these poems 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. Powerful in its evocation of anger and forgiveness, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the powerful emotional context, this book, as with her previous one, has been described as ‘deeply consoling’. It contains the long and highly praised sequence, ‘Dead Mother Poems’, dealing with the death of the mother and the caring by the daughter and the effect of depression in the mother who was both invasive and rejecting.