When Robyn Rowland’s fourth book of poetry, Shadows at the Gate, was launched with a reading to sustained applause at Adelaide Writers Week in March 2004, it confirmed her position as a fine reader of her own deeply moving poetry. After her reading at Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Eileen Battersby wrote in The Irish Times: ‘Memory, anecdotal narrative and strong emotion shape Rowland’s strong, personal and well-crafted verse.’ Her reading was ‘honest and questioning’ and ‘Irish history filters through her story as told in appealing, unsentimental but humanly touching poems.’

Robyn Rowland has written 8 books, five of them poetry. Her new and fifth book of poems, Silence and its tongues, will be launched at Clifden Arts Week, Galway, in September 2006. Her fourth, Shadows at the Gate, was published in 2004 by Five Islands Press. It is set primarily in Ireland, where she has lived and worked over a 22 year period, reading and teaching at most major literary festivals there.

In 2003/2004 ABC Radio National’s PoeticA featured her work in a programme titled ‘Shadows at the Gate: the poetry of Robyn Rowland’, covering three of her books. ABC Radio National’s The Spirit of Things covered her Irish experience of exile and belonging in an extended interview, ‘Inspirited Landscapes’. In 2002 she won both the Catalpa Poetry Prize and the overall Writers Prize from the Australian-Irish Heritage Association. She has been a poetry judge for the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Society of Women Writers Victoria, Australian Capital Territory Writer’s Centre Poetry Prize, and W.B. Yeats Australian and New Zealand Poetry Prize.

Previously Professor of Social Inquiry at Deakin University, Dr Robyn Rowland AO, spent 18 years creating critiques of reproductive technology and genetic engineering, producing her book Living Laboratories Women and Reproductive Technology in 1992. Her work was used by national and international committees in framing legislation, and she has addressed the House of Lords, London, on embryo experimentation. She was made an Officer in the Order of Australia for her contribution to higher education and women's health in 1996, and retired that year from academic life after breast cancer and burnout.

Reviews an comments on Robyn’s poetry and readings:

Irish poet Michael Coady : ‘These poems are organic outgrowths of a life encompassing both Ireland and Australia, love and loss, anchorage and dislocation, hurt and healing. While retaining artistic control, Robyn Rowland allows real feeling to inform her poetry, rather than playing safe with a fashionably detached ironic mode. Shadows at the Gate authentically sings of tenderness and courage in the face of ‘time’s corrosive kiss’.

Rowland, unlike many more cautious poets, is not afraid to risk the personal. Intensity is what she is after and you don’t get that by pulling the punches ... Redolent with emotion ... attachment to place and a growing sense of identity ... dealing with vulnerability ...’ Geoff Page, The Canberra Times; Books and Writing, ABC Radio National.

She’s a diarist poet, writing clear detailed narratives, spiked with metaphor and she’s not afraid of displaying emotion without the bathrobe of irony.’ Mike Ladd PoeticA. ABC Radio National.

‘This is a poetry that argues for, and frequently justifies, a rapturous approach to life ... memorable because the rapture in them is something conscious, something achieved.’ Lisa Gorton, Australian Book Review, on ‘Shadows at the Gate’

Perverse Serenity: was described by critic and poet Barrett Reid as ‘drawn with rare honesty and a compelling strength of observation which involves the reader’. He wrote: ‘here is writing not afraid to be vulnerable, not trapped in literary artifice, not reticent about emotion, its hopes, its fears, its withdrawals and assertions, which we all share and which enrich our humanity. A memorable picture emerges of a contemporary woman, intelligent and able to feel deeply, who is not afraid to feel the incompleteness, the unfinished edges of human love’.

‘Rowland is a fluent, eloquent poet ... the sensually explicit lines skilfully manage their metaphor.. Her passionate political poems will give heart to many readers’. ‘There is ardour and brave candour in this celebratory stance’. Barry Hill, Poetry editor, The Weekend Australian, Books Extra, Review, March 30. 2002.

Fiery Waters: ‘is a generous and passionate book. The sensualist shines through: shrewd, empathic, intimate. Rowland celebrates the immediacy of experience, the poignancy of happiness. The poems are arranged almost seasonably and the natural world is an implacable metronome..’ - ‘.. the poems leave a sensation of warmth long after reading them’. Jennifer Harrison, Five Bells.