Notes on Robyn Rowland’s poetry on Turkey

Abstract

The Irish Australian poet Robyn Rowland represents her dual cultural identity and hybridity in her poems that expand on large cultural landscapes. Her poems are not only the reflections of her bicultural background but also the representatives of her multicultural worldview. Therefore, the thematic scope of her poetry covers larger cultural landscapes than those of Australia. Her keen interest in Turkey brings yet another cultural dimension to her poetry and turns her into an explorer of Turkish cultural landscape. This article aims to analyze and examine Robyn Rowland’s poetry on Turkey in terms of cultural diversity and cultural exchange. The purpose here is to question how mutual cultural prejudices and admirations contribute to cultural dialogue in Rowland’s poems and interrogate whether or not this dialogism in poetry contributes to a reciprocal semantic and cultural exchange through bilingual and bicultural poetic narration.