Robyn Rowlands and her father, Norm.

Steep Curve by Robyn Rowland, 5 Islands Press 2024, was introduced by Carmel Macdonald-Grahame at the Boom Galley, Geelong on Saturday 16 November 2024

Welcome to this celebration of the latest work of Robyn Rowland, a poetry collection entitled Steep Curve. The meaning of which will become clear when you read the work. I use the word, work, because while all good books are usually the result of long hard intellectual labour, this one comes also of filial effort beyond what most of us will ever take on. It comes of mighty physical and emotional commitment, as you will discover when you read the poems. And this at a time when the country was reeling under COVID, so filial effort in less supported and comfortable circumstances than might otherwise have been possible.

What comes of that experience, in Robyn’s hands, is another volume of luminous poetry. A poetry of love and grief.

Robyn Rowland has a long-established reputation for intellectual excellence. She is a renowned educator and ground breaker in woman’s health. Her publications have included such nonfiction academic work in her field as Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technologies. That work was asking questions that are as relevant now as they were then.

Oh, she has strings to her bow! Foundation Head of the School of Social Inquiry at Deakin, Director of the Australian Women’s Research Centre. Awarded Officer in the Order of Australia in 1996. Twelve books of poetry. And to top it off, she is a swimming champion!

Thanks to the much-appreciated revival of Five Islands Press, led by poets Mark Tredinnick and Steve Meyrick, we now have Steep Curve. Robyn is meticulous not only about the writing itself, but she is scrupulous about the publication of her poetry. She takes the work of publication seriously and insists on it being perfectly presented on the page. So her books are also beautiful objects.

Robyn’s affiliations with Ireland will be known to many. The cadences of her poetry call to mind Celtic rhythms, an embrace of language, the musicality of its phrasing, its sumptuousness. Her poetry is always deeply personal and insightful about the places where she has lived: Ireland and Türkiye in particular. Friendship, love, loss are her subjects. She has confronted the loss of her mother in poetry. In poetry she mourns the losses of lovers, friends. This Intimate War, Gallipoli-Çannakale 1915  – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 takes her into the realm of war, where the poems are unflinching even about this subject so central to our own national mythology. Even in the theatre of war there is friendship, affection, maternal love. Richness combining, in this case, in a poetry shared across both English and Turkish languages.

The fact that I’m here to celebrate this latest volume of poetry with Robyn comes of a small personal story. All friendships do, I suppose, but this one seems special, because it’s about the transformational power of poetry.

I had just arrived in Victoria after living overseas for several years, was feeling estranged from pretty much everything really, not unhappily, but nonetheless, estranged. And I had discovered the ABC’s PoeticA. One afternoon I tuned in to the show late and heard poetry that struck me like a shower of stars. (Now – I have a history with literature and feminism from back in the day, when feminist theorists were thinking hard about whether such a thing can be said to exist as a gendered voice in writing, a feminine voice. I remember thinking that if there is such a thing, this was it!)

Robyn, it turned out, was reading from Silence & Its Tongues, 2006. The imagery was spectacularly lunar. Let me share the lines she was reading. I remember it vividly.

Out there, on the horizon, a
tangerine full moon rises from raven-shot clouds
in a sky feathered kingfisher-blue.

And later in the same poem—

Another curve in the road, the sky is black, bereft.
Then behind a harem grille of cloud,
the moon, embarrassed to have risen flushed and unclothed,
reassembles her garb,
cloaks herself in silvery sheath over
shadowy nipples, purpled cleft,
to shine singular, a little haughty, above the turrets.
Beneath, only a pool of talc
on the softened skin of sea.

The poem, This Moon, captured the experience of driving the Great Ocean Road from Apollo Bay. Its impact had to do with the effect language can have, how the right pen can seize a reality and strike it into ensorcelling imagery. It captured how compelling rhythms can pluck us from the moment, so we travel with them as on a line of music. It was poetry with that kind of passionate and sensuous energy.

I was compelled. I contacted the ABC to find out who the poet was and where I could buy the work. They passed me on to Robyn herself, and I rang and ordered all of her collections thus far. And then, as synchronicity would have it, a couple of years later, our paths crossed through a mutual friend.

I no longer subscribe to the notion of a gendered voice in writing I think —as Edward de Bono remarked, if you never change your mind, what’s the point of having one — but I know the direct unmediated response I had to Robyn’s work was an effect of the poetry itself. I do think there is such a thing as a poetic voice. Not always, but sometimes, it somehow contrives to create a bridge between music and meaning. It makes us see. It reaches for something beyond words, beyond the pragmatic, into feeling. It makes straight for the heart.

And now we are here, Robyn and I, in this community of writers gathering to celebrate poetry. Which brings me to Maria Takolander.

I’m delighted to introduce Maria who will launch Steep Curve. An illustrious member of this writing community, Maria and I have met in person only today, so I hope she won’t think me presumptuous. I’m no stranger to her work and writing.

I have heard Maria present at a Geelong Writers Festival, am aware of her contributions as a teacher and mentor in Australian literary and intellectual life, and I know Geelong is lucky to have her. Her collection of stories The Double appeared in 2013 and was reviewed in superlatives. As is her work, generally and consistently.

Then in 2022 I had the pleasure of participating in the selection process for the Australian Society of Literature’s gold medal for that year. Maria Takolander’s Trigger Warning surfaced among the judges to be listed among the important publications of that year, immediately and unanimously. The collection is marked by the ferocious intelligence and astute observation that are evident in all Maria Takolander’s work. The poetry is beyond clever, it is deeply relevant, resonant and superbly written. It faces down the world we live in and sounds the alarm. At the same time, the poet allows the work to be deeply personal, making it a truly courageous collection. It is steeped in an intellectual tradition, as the notes tell us, from Sylvia Plath to Anne Carson…the great Canadian classicist and author of similarly challenging, confronting and erudite work. Poetry which invites its readers to think. It is no surprise then that Trigger Warning won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award that year.

Also a public artist, Maria Takolander’s words are inscribed on bronze plaques in Central Geelong and at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. So, I’m delighted finally to have met her in person and to be introducing her to you here today….

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Carmel Macdonald Grahame has taught literature and creative writing at secondary and tertiary institutions in her home state of Western Australia. She holds a PhD in Australian Literature for work on Dorothy Hewett. Her short fiction, poetry, critical essays and reviews have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Australia and Canada, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Westerly, Grieve, Quadrant, and Liquid Amber Press anthologies. Her novel Personal Effects was published in 2014 (UWAP). Her latest publication is Angles (2023), a poetry collaboration with Karen Throssell. Prizes and awards include the Katharine Susannah Prichard Foundation Award for short fiction, the Melbourne Poets Union Prize and the Patricia Hackett Prize for poetry. In 2022 Carmel was a judge for the ALS Gold Medal. She has edited volumes of poetry for the Melbourne Poets Union and other poetry publications and was a presenter at the 2024 Australian Short Story Festival.

Steep Curve, by Robyn Rowlands is available at https://www. 5islandspress. com/product-page/steep-curve-by-robyn-rowland