Since 1982, Robyn Rowland has published three poetry collections at roughly ten-year intervals. She has also been an eminent, sometimes controversial, academic. Her poetry must have been a release from the stylistic and emotional restrictions of her academic work.

Fiery Waters, her new collection, is a leisurely and deeply felt progress across most aspects of a middle-aged woman’s life. Both sensual and sensuous, it is concerned with the ‘real world’, whether in apparently autobiographical poems of love and loss or in her more political poems against injustices here and overseas.

The book commences with a section on sexual love involving a somewhat problematic relationship between a young man who eventually wants to move on, and the narrator, an older woman who wants to settle down. The poems are generally erotic (‘just delicate fingers on the thigh loosens, just lips whispering hot over the nipple shivers’) but they also have a sense of distance that comes with experience: ‘In middle age it begins not to matter – / the shape of the body, the softer more malleable flesh. / We know other things.’ Rowland then proceeds to poems about her children (including a powerful one, ‘Unbirthday’, about a woman mourning an inescapable abortion) and about the end of the relationship already mentioned.