Robin Rowland
Robyn Rowland is an Irish-Australian citizen living in both countries. She regularly works in Turkey. She has written 13 books, 10 of poetry. Her latest books are Mosaics from the Map (Doire Press, Galway, 2018) and her bi-lingual This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 (Five Islands and Bilge Kultur Sanat in Turkey, 2015; republished by Spinifex Press, Australia, 2018). Turkish translations, Mehmet Ali Çelikel.
Robyn’s poetry appears in national and international journals and in over forty anthologies, including eight editions of Best Australian Poems. She has read and taught in Ireland for 35 years and has been invited to read in India, Portugal, Ireland, the UK, the USA, Greece, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey and Italy, where, along with Canada, Spain and Japan, she has also been published, sometimes in translation. She has two CDs of poetry, Off the Tongue and Silver Leaving – Poems & Harp with Lynn Saoirse. She has been filmed reading for the National Irish Poetry Reading Archive, James Joyce Library, University College Dublin, available on Youtube.
For over 18 years Dr Robyn Rowland AO was involved in feminist critiques and campaigns against reproductive and genetic engineering, work contained in her book Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technologies (Spinifex Press, 1992).
Robyn’s poetry has been featured on Australian and Irish national radio programs. She was an Honorary Fellow, School of Culture and Communication 2008-2012, University of Melbourne; was a member of the National Advisory Council for Australia Poetry Ltd 2010-2013; curated and presented the Poetry & Conversation Series for the Geelong Library Corporation, 2010-2013; and was inaugural Deputy Chair of the Board of the Australian Poetry Centre 2007-2009. Previously Professor of Social Inquiry and Women’s Studies at Deakin University, she retired in 1996 and was created an Officer in the Order of Australia for her contribution to higher education and women’s health.
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Robyn Rowland
Turkish translations by Dr Mehmet Ali Çelikel
‘Very few collections bring home so powerfully the vulnerability of individuals in the face of history’ writes Lisa Gorton of Robyn Rowland’s powerful poems recording the experiences of soldiers, nurses and doctors, women munitions workers, wives, mothers, composers, painters and poets during the Gallipoli War, 1915.
It began with the Battle of Çanakkale and the defeat of the British navy. The land battle was hand-to-hand killing, the physical closeness of its soldiers unmasking the depersonalisation of the propaganda of war.
Stories of Australian, Turkish and Irish men and women in these poems show the intimate nature of war; not from the perspective of victory but from the perspective of those caught up in war, who, whichever side they were on, lost. —Lisa Gorton
Both the English and Turkish languages face each other across the pages as the men faced each other across narrow spaces between the trenches. ‘In translating impeccably Dr Rowland’s poems into Turkish, Professor M. Ali Çelikel has commendably conveyed the epic depth and literary qualities embodied in the poems’. —Himmet Umunç
Importantly, the book finishes with a poem on women’s friendship 100 years after the war, and the healing nature of love.
2018 | ISBN 9781925581386 | Paperback | 210 x 150 mm | 120 pp