About Poety Matters

Poetry Matters is a home-grown print poetry journal that began in Spring 2006.

Censorship can take many forms. The inability to find a place of publication can be social censorship.


Poetry is freedom. Anyone can write poetry.


Nevertheless, it takes a lot of work to create the poetry that reaches the places only poetry knows.


Whoever you are, wherever you are,
Poetry Matters welcomes you as readers and writers.

Contact me about submissions and subscriptions: poetry.clh@gmail.com

21 August 2012

David Rowbotham

"You know, when I was a young boy, I didn't know what to call what was inside of me . . . now I know it was poetry."


  "a rebellious boy in patched pants sitting in the apricot tree staring out at a world I could never enter in any other way than by scribbling poems and stories in my exercise book".

 Malouf, an old friend of Rowbotham, on reading two small volumes published in 2005 (The Brown Island and The Cave in the Sky) wrote to Rowbotham praising the work. "These poems seem to me to have a new transparency and ease, and nobility and quality of immediate memorability that really is the sort of achievement that only comes to a poet, if it comes at all, when he has freed himself of everything except what needs now to be said."

His daughter Jill, a journalist with The Australian, recalls that in has last years he was "virtually blind but wrote daily using giant print on an enormous computer screen". At 86, inside the frail frame, there was still that young boy trying to give utterance to a rich internal life that expressed itself in some of the finest Australian poems written. In the poem The Cave in the Sky Rowbotham wrote in a richly metaphoric way about dying: "If memory lives, then memory cares." And so he will be remembered.

 Poet David Rowbotham's late flowering crowned a life's work

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