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About the author
ROBYN ROWLAND, an Australian-Irish citizen, has been living between Ireland and Australia for over 30 years, and working, teaching and reading in Turkey since 2009. From December 2019 until late 2022 she lived back in Australia, caring for her father, who died, aged 102. She has eleven poetry books (Australia, Ireland and Turkey), including Mosaics From The Map (Doire, Ireland 2018) and two bilingual, Turkish translations, Mehmet Ali Çelikel: Under This Saffron Sun—Safran Güneşin Altında (Knocknareone, Ireland 2019) and This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915—İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 (Five Islands Press, Australia and Bilge Kültür Sanat, Türkiye, 2015. Repub. Spinifex, 2018)).
She has been awarded Australia Council and Copyright Agency grants, and various writing residencies. Robyn has won or been listed for many prizes e.g shortlisted for the ACU Poetry Prize, Newcastle Poetry Prize, Peter Porter Poetry Prize, Lane Cove Poetry Prize, Society of Women Writers National Poetry Prize, Antipodes: Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature International Poetry prize, Liquid Amber Poetry Prize.
Robyn has published multiple book reviews, journals articles, book chapters on literature and poetry. Her poetry appears in national/international journals in nine countries, fifty anthologies, and eight editions of Best Australian Poems. She has read at major literary festivals in India, Portugal, Ireland, UK, USA, Greece, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey and Italy, and is published in translation in a number of these. She is filmed reading for the National Irish Poetry Reading Archive, James Joyce Library, UCD, on YouTube.
About the book
STEEP CURVE is a book of final father poems. Returning to Australia from Ireland, December 2019, the poet sees her active, independent father, almost 100, beginning to age. The two, initially uncertain what’s happening, live together two and a half years, and during covid lockdown. They share the poet’s childhood home, which her father built 65 years before. Her sole caring grows their relationship through physical and emotional challenges, anger, frustration, loss and love.
Drawn together in an intimacy few daughters or fathers experience, comfort for the poet lies in a practice she develops of observing daily ‘one lovely thing’. Resulting nature poems are interspersed in the book. The loss of Ireland for the poet, drives reflections on place and ‘home’. Additionally, past poems for her father are interleaved as ‘backspaces’, creating a rich picture of a long, loving, sometimes difficult relationship. Heartbreaking and tender, poems created with love and skill: this is the poetic narrative of their shared journey.
Cover Image: Detail from Secret Cove, by Vera Gaffney.
Steeped in Irish song, schooled in bush ballads, and enchanted by Australia’s Eastern coastline, Robyn Rowland comes into the stony territory of grief with a poet’s toolkit as sharp, as refined, as subtle and silken with use as only the finest carpenter could boast. In the “puzzle-maze of caring” for her centenarian father, the reader follows Rowland’s supple, breathtaking lines into the onslaughts of old age, and further—into the lives of butterflies, birds, dragonflies, flowers, fig trees, and even the feral cats of coastal life. On apricot sands, under moonlight, at the bony ends of a beachscape, or attending to the leaking legs of her father, as he goes into “the oldest certain dark,” Robyn Rowland never shirks from the details, the hard facts, the sting of the sublime. Steep Curve is a book of remarkable moments and enduring love.
KEVIN BROPHY
Robyn Rowland’s wistful, wise and meticulously crafted Steep Curve speaks of what it is to give oneself in the service of a loved one. This book dexterously captures the humility, grace and wisdom a daughter divines in tending daily to an ageing, then dying father. With limitless love and wry humour, Rowland, a nomad poet reluctantly grounded in her childhood home in the Illawarra, New South Wales, finds herself caring for her father in his last years, in the process unpicking old wounds and family stories, in “this house of mixed memory” with its ghosts, “splintered surfaces,” old fruit trees, and “so much salted history.” Through the poet’s daily pursuit of “one lovely thing” while she tends her father, we are granted “a delicate glittery window into the blue of everything.” Beyond the confines of a house by the coast in a time of lockdown: we see with her the snow-white beauty of a dead cuttlefish “casting about for what is lost,” “the quiet patience of this street,” “the broken bones of shells,” and “the language of lime tree, lawn and basil.” With her, we learn “how to let go,” to release a father at last “into the night’s shroud of rain, into the oldest certain dark.”
In Steep Curve, Robyn Rowland fashions a language to guide us through the labour of loving care and the anguish of the aftermath.
ANNE CASEY