Rowbotham’s latest poems do more than cap a distinguished career, or reconnoiter a long acquaintance with the United States that has long made him one of the most admired Australian Poets in this country. They are pro-American in the deepest sense, not, that is to say, out of a heedless embrace of the politics or pop culture of the moment, but out of a sustained love of a country whose mystery has been that its losses nearly keep pace with its aspirations. With balladic yet jagged rhyme that all at once sings and stings, ambitious poems like “The Perfect Birch” or “I Wonder Who Owns the Fourth of July” traverse new, if hallowed, ground. Punning, assonant, curiously wrought, anchored in history yet not consumed by it, Rowbotham’s verse is pertinent and pure. Poems for America may well be one of the first Australian poetry books of the twenty-first century that will survive in the way that only art can. —Nicholas Birns, Antipodes (USA)

[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.
— Ed.]

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 Courier-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,
sail 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

The collection is remarkable that, at his present age, Rowbotham has embarked on new themes, and given us vignettes of another country that are sharp and strange. His continued artistic vigour is inspiring. — Chris Koch

Rowbotham is one of our most enduring poets. This collection—spare, idiosyncratic, agile, eliptical, immediately alive to the present—is the summing up of a life lived in time and events: depression, childhood, war, the long post-War. A witness to the rock-hard integrity of his voice and vision over more than half a century. — David Malouf

The American poems are knotty, sometimes almost fierce, but there is the lyrical quality that becomes, at times, full of echoes of a wealth of resonances, like overtones. The second half of the book rounds off with a series of wonderful elegies. A very strong book. — Tom Shapcott

A poet of real significance.—Martin Duwell

Rowbotham addresses the great themes of human existence with humility, grace and craftsmanship.— Manfred Jurgensen

Rowbotham should be nominated for a Patrick White Prize.
— David Gilbey