Poems for America - Softcover

Rowbotham, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1876819111 ISBN 13: 9781876819118

Publisher: Interactive Publications, 2007

Poetry. Back in 1994, when David Rowbotham released his New and Selected Poems, 1945-1993, a flurry of reviews appeared in the major newspapers and magazines remarking on how richly Rowbotham deserved more recognition as one of Australia's major poets of the past century. But if he is the most major of Australia's neglected poets, what is remarkable is that Rowbotham has continued to write sixty years on, in a confident and lucid voice that transcends single continents and cultures. POEMS FOR AMERICA is certain to earn Rowbotham that elusive literary Oscar.

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About the Author:

Veteran Australian poet, author and journalist David Rowbotham was born at Toowoomba, Queensland, in 1924. He now lives in active retirement in Brisbane where he was the inaugural arts and literary editor of Brisbane's The Courier-Mail. He was educated at Toowoomba East State, Toowoomba Grammar, and the Universities of Queensland and Sydney. He holds the Ford Memorial Medal for Poetry (University of Queensland), has won the Henry Lawson Prize (University of Sydney) and the Grace Leven Prize, as well as second prize for poetry in the New South Wales Captain Cook Bicentenary Celebrations Literary Competitions. He has a BA degree and is an AM in the Order of Australia. After service as a wireless operator with the RAAF in the South West Pacific, he worked as a journalist in Sydney and London, and has travelled widely, receiving recognition in the United States where he has resided, lectured and been published. His 20 books of verse and prose include a novel and a volume of short stories. He has a publishing history of 60 years, and was a contributor to the revival of poetry in Australia in the postwar 1940s. In 1989 he was awarded an Emeritus Fellowship by the Australia Council for his "contribution to the national heritage."

Review:

Rowbotham s latest poems do more than cap a distinguished career, or reconnoiter a long acquaintance with the United States that has long made him one of the most admired Australian Poets in this country. They are pro-American in the deepest sense, not, that is to say, out of a heedless embrace of the politics or pop culture of the moment, but out of a sustained love of a country whose mystery has been that its losses nearly keep pace with its aspirations. With balladic yet jagged rhyme that all at once sings and stings, ambitious poems like The Perfect Birch or I Wonder Who Owns the Fourth of July traverse new, if hallowed, ground. Punning, assonant, curiously wrought, anchored in history yet not consumed by it, Rowbotham s verse is pertinent and pure. Poems for America may well be one of the first Australian poetry books of the twenty-first century that will survive in the way that only art can. --Nicholas Birns, Antipodes, USA

Australian poets usually have to come to America from the outside, battling their way through historical categories and travelogue sensations. David Rowbotham, a former literary editor of Brisbane s newspaper The Courier-Mail who has been publishing poetry since 1954, makes a point of telling us that he has two grandsons in the US who are American- minded . Hence a volume that has the manner of a poet s novel about himself as well as being a missive to and for America. The most intimate poem addresses his American grandsons, post September 11: Go out and watch, and tell me what we came to be: Too much for a world to judge, there was pain, sail red, and a baleful age beyond the sea. --Barry Hill, The Australian

Rowbotham is one of our most enduring poets. This collection spare, idiosyncratic, agile, eliptical, immediately alive to the present is the summing up of a life lived in time and events: depression, childhood, war, the long post-War. A witness to the rock-hard integrity of his voice and vision over more than half a century. --David Malouf

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