Eileen Batersby wrote in The Irish Times after Robyn’s reading on Inis Oirr for Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway,: ‘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.’

Seasons of doubt & burning: New & Selected poems (2010)

These poems from almost forty years of publication show growth, from open simplicity to a rich, resonant maturity. Their hallmark is deep honesty and emotional accessibility.

Robyn Rowland draws her images from deep old places and from the room you are in right now, curtains unable to stop the radiance from spilling in. Her poems are richly wrought, sensuous, full of passion and restraint. They're luminous and earthy at the same time and open the reader's ear to hear the silence of the lost. In these difficult times, she's the poet I'm looking for: 'an angel she could be, or hope in flight'.  Lorna Crozier, Canada

In this passionate volume., Robyn Rowland’s sensuous imagery is crafted by a fine intellect; the music of her lines vibrates in the memory. Poems from earlier books gather momentum leading to a generous selection of brilliant new work. These lyrical poems are crafted in various forms and trace a journey where love is cherished along the way to possible celebration. The intensity of feeling evoked in the profound love poems makes reading this book a joy.   Robert Adamson, Australia

‘Where does she live now but inside language’.     Grace O’Grady, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Silence & its tongues (2006):

‘The poems’ settings range from Australian to Ireland, but the truer landscape is the human heart, scarred but resilient ...  Rowland’s lessons, transmitted through rich poetic language, can be heard by anyone willing to listen with both the head and the heart. 

Michael C. Kuhne. Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian literature.

Shadows at the gate (2004):

 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’.  

‘Soaked in the richness of lived experience and its accompanying shadows..tightly constructed, thick with description and image’, Andrea Breen, Island 98, Spring 2004

Fiery Waters (2001):

  ‘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.

‘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.

‘Both sensual and sensuous, it is concerned with the “real world”’. Poems have a ‘great personal intensity’. ‘She deals tellingly with a range of injustices around the world, always bringing out their human dimensions rather than simply wringing her hands. With ‘no obvious stylistic or literary or political allegiance.. a talented woman writing directly and courageously out of her own experiences.’ Geoff Page, winner of the Patrick White Literary Award 2002, review in Australian Book Review, March 2002.

Perverse Serenity (1990/1992):

 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’.

Filigree in Blood (1982) :

was ‘powerful and commanding’, ‘with that degree of integrity which makes one pay attention’.

Of Robyn Rowland’s work, her publisher Ron Pretty wrote:

Rowland’s skill as a poet is to combine lilt with  passion, musicality with social concern, clarity with depth. She has always had the ability to see the political in the personal, to see the world, not in a mustard seed, but in the space between two bodies, or the errant human cell. 

As well, she  is a poet who does not stand still. There has been, in the writing since the previous book, a tightening of the line, a moving towards a greater conciseness, without, it should be stressed, any loss of the music. There is something European or perhaps Irish in her poetic consciousness: she handles passion and laughter, politics and loss with equal confidence. Her work is very sensual and encompasses a broad range from the political to love affairs that go astray, death and cancer’.

The Worchester Review described her work as dealing with ‘sensual, erotic and heterosexual themes ... in a startlingly honest style’.

CDs, Off the tongue  (2008) Silver Leaving - Poems & Har,  with Lynn Saoirce (2010)

BBC Actor John Nettles said on Connemara radio last year after Clifden Arts Week, that he comes to hear Robyn read and named her as’ among the first rank of poets’, impressed ‘by her use of language, control of verse and wonderful delivery’. Her accent, he said, ‘gives an added piquancy to her delivery’ and the poetry is ‘extraordinarily moving, wonderfully insightful’ with ‘a control of language I haven’t come across since, well, TS Eliot.  Like Dylan Thomas and Betjeman, you have to hear her yourself. She is the voice.’

 Of her readings Grainne Millar, Tyrone Guthrie Centre wrote; ‘inspirational and deeply moving reading’ and Michael Roche, Second Secretary Australian Embassy Dublin wrote: ‘Accessible, exquisite diction and moving expression’.