[Poems for America was reviewed by The Australian’s Poetry Editor along with other works published since September 11, most notably John Updike’s Americana and Other Poems.]
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 Court-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,
sale red,
and a baleful age
beyond the sea.
Rowbotham’s weakness is a tendency to badgering doggerel, but just when you think he has gone too far he can pull images and energies together:
Baghdad’s caliph invokes
the olive grove; his dove’s
about, there’s no messiah
but sands of unbelief
in blindfold fire.
(‘Baghdad & Manhattan’)
Beneath the noisy surface of this poem is a Karantzakis grip on life-and-death struggles of personal life and empire. Rowbotham, an old soldier at 78, offers a grim address for our times when he says, in a poem about the US Civil War, ‘you make me. I am war’. What’s of interest is a veteran Australian poet using America to further create the wild coherence in himself. - Barry Hill, The Australian