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

• by: Phil Brown
• From: The Australian
• October 08, 2010   

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/poets-late-flowering-crowned-a-lifes-work/story-e6frg8n6-1225935637230 

The Gardener

I watched my father digging in his garden.

His spade, with a sound like the palm of a huge hand 

Against a huger tree, struck through the soil,

Lifted, turned, let fall. He pounded with care

Each stubborn clod and broke it into earth

That flowed between his fingers;

And the peewit came from the nest in the camphor-laurel

And, with a bird's simplicity, like a child's trust,

Stabbed for worms in the shadow of his knees.

You can not know the kindness of a man

Till you see him in a garden with a spade

And birds about his feet.

  

from Bungalow and Hurricane

published 1967 by Angus & Robertson, Sydney.