AustLit

'I’ve always been a big fan of Jean’s work. My first encounter with her poetry was in her 1988 National Library Prize winning sequence, ‘Verandah Poems’. In the sequence, the verandah, the liminal space, becomes the conduit between past and present, deftly weaving them together to show how the present embodies the past, how memory is the way we balance and make sense of our lives.' (Introduction)

'There’s no one quite like Robyn Rowland in Australian poetry. For a start, she rarely seems to be here, in Australia. For years, Rowland has threaded a life between Ireland and Australia, the country of her heritage and her birth country. Her poetry has always been marked by the tension inherent in this dual sense of identity, but these two books take it further, adding a passionate engagement with Turkey to the mix. Australia makes cameo appearances in these books, but it’s never the focus. As she says, adopting the voice of her great grandmother: ‘. . . I’m restless./I want to keep moving. Maybe it’s in the blood, roaming.’ (‘Arriving Sydney Annie Harding Lambert, 1889).' (Introduction)