Rosemarie Rowley

Bio Note

Posted by Rosemarie Rowley on Sep 25 2007

Rosemarie Rowley was born in 1942, and received a Dublin Corporation scholarship in the fifties, when she achieved the highest marks of all entrants in English. After a spell working in the Agricultural Institute, she read Rachel Carson’s “The Silent Spring” and left her job to seek higher education, first teaching in England in the industrial city of Birmingham. She then attended Trinity College Dublin, and has degrees in Irish and English literature, in which she won a Distinction, and philosophy. While at Trinity College in the 1960s she published her first poems. She also studied psychology later on, obtaining a diploma from the National University of Ireland. In the seventies, she worked for a time in the nascent film industry in Ireland, which didn’t really take off until later, and as there were few jobs open to married women in teaching and the Civil Service, she emigrated to Luxembourg where she worked as a European fonctionnaire for a number of years. She took early retirement, and worked as a volunteer coordinator in the Green Alliance, part of the emerging environmental movement in Ireland. During this time she was bringing up her son David, she gained a Master’s in Literature from Trinity College, for her thesis on the long poems of Patrick Kavanagh. She also began to publish her books of poetry – see publications – to date she has published five books of poetry, not counting a Cold War poetry pamphlet, “Politry” and has four times won the Epic award in the Scottish International Poetry Competition.

“The Sea of Affliction” ((1987) one of the first works in eco-feminism, can be accessed and downloaded from the Irish Literary Revival website, under a Creative Commons agreement at: The Irish Literary Revival website

Her long poem in terza rima, “Flight into Reality” is the longest original poem in that form in English, and is based on the story of Osiris and Isis, of the Egyptian myth, but set in modern times.

Her most recent books are “Hot Cinquefoil Star” (2002) and “In Memory of Her” (2004) and (2008)both published by Rowan Tree Press, Dublin

Rosemarie at Irish Writers Online

A selection of her poetry can be accessed at at the RPO Library

Recently, The Wooing of Etain , based on the Old Irish myth, was published in Transverse, Journal of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto Press, 2007, now online at
this website

Her account of her work in the early days of the Irish green movement can be accessed here

Rosemarie is a member of the United Arts Club, and President of the Irish Byron Society (see link)

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