Perverse Serenity
What happens when an Australian feminist falls in love with an Irish monk? Robyn Rowland travelled to Ireland hoping to delve into her family's history. She circles the country, driving its roads in search of something more. What she finds is risk, uncertainty, clarity and turbulence. Is this love wasted, dry and juiceless? Or is the tearing what love should be all about? In poems that soar and wreck themselves at the base of cliffs, Robyn Rowland takes us into a raw and exultant world.
1992 | ISBN 9781875559138 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 71 pp
Reviews
‘The poems are characterised by a strength of passion, by a searching self-examination, by a daring of emotion that is reflected in the language and images.’
–John Hanrahan
'This poetry is vast with remembering.’
–Meg Tasker, Australian Women’s Book Review
‘Here is a picture of a woman’s divided loves, for a love in Ireland and for one in Australia, drawn with rare honesty and a compelling strength of observation … Here is writing not afraid to be vulnerable, not trapped in literary artifice, nor reticent about emotion, its hopes, its fears, its withdrawals and assertions, which we all share and which enrich our humanity.’
–Barrett Reid
Table of Contents
PART ONE
Searching
The beginning
PART TWO
Juggling
End in view
The risk
Re-leaving
Airborne
PART THREE
Wavering
Wasting
Uphill, still climbing
Toward clarity
Perverse serenity
PART FOUR
Finale
When love goes
Losing you
Changing
After Carringbush Ceili
Surviving single
Offerings
Reassessing
Dolphins
if
Black spring
Murroe
Ahead
Recurrent tug
PART FIVE
Winter surfaces
The final season
Spent
The storm
To satisfy
Glossary