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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.