Elisabeth Rowe read English at Somerville College, Oxford, and has worked as a teacher, Citizens Advice Bureau Manager and childcare Social Worker.
 
She retired early and began to spend more time writing, both fiction and poetry.
 
Her first collection Surface Tension was published by Peterloo Poets in 2003, and her second Thin Ice by Oversteps Books in 2010. Her third and fourth collections Taking Shape (2013) and Timewise (2019) are also from Oversteps Books. Her poems were featured in Open-mouthed (Prospect Books 2006) and Images of Women (Arrowhead Press 2006 ), Sandscript (Chickichong Publishing 2014), Hands and Wings (White Rat Press 2015), several Poetry on the Lake anthologies and many by Grey Hen Press, including Cracking On, Running Before the Wind, Songs for the Unsung, Reflected Light and Out of Context, as well as other anthologies. A collection of her comic poems Diversion Ahead was self-published in 2018 and is available from the author.
 
Elisabeth’s work has also been published in Oxford Today, ARTEMISpoetry, Poetry Wales, The Interpreter’s House, Private international review of photographs and Private online, London Art, Poetry and Audience, The Financial Times, and Poetry on The Lake journals.
 
She has been a prize-winner in several competitions including Peterloo Poets, Virginia Warbey, Wells International, Second Light, Chagwood, Grey Hen and Poetry on the Lake, and has been commended, runner-up or short-listed at Words by the Water, Strokestown (both open and satirical/comic categories), Ware Poets, Kent and Sussex, Ilkley, Wells, Poetry on the Lake, Virginia Warbey, Second Light, Split the Lark, How Do I Love Thee, Teignmouth and Mirehouse.
 
Elisabeth loves to write comic/satirical verse and poems for special occasions as well as serious poetry. She has three unpublished novels languishing on the shelf, and a handful of short stories. She is a member of Roselle Angwin’s Two Rivers poetry group, the Company of Poets and a small group of local writers. She lives in a wooded valley on the edge of Dartmoor with her husband Anthony, and has three children and nine grandchildren, some of whom are shaping as excellent young poets.
 

In this fourth collection Elisabeth Rowe’s distinctive voice explores mortality, the imperatives of time passing and the evanescence of experience against sensitively drawn landscapes of, amongst others, her beloved Dartmoor, the Northern expanses of British Columbia, Colonial India and bird and wildlife. Her deftly constructed poems resonate with observations of the temporal and natural world laced with wisdom and often wry humour.

 

Christopher North, cover comment on Timewise

 
 

Elisabeth’s poems are characterised by an intense relationship with landscape, often Nordic, a gently satirical exploration of human behaviour and a strong elegiac vein.

 

From the cover of Thin Ice

 
 

Elisabeth Rowe writes about the strangeness of being human, about the fragile membrane between idea and reality, the delicate absurdities in everyday experience, the unacknowledged tragedies of childhood, the secret perceptions that only poetry can deal with.

 

Dr. R V Bailey

 
 

She can be serious, lyrical, funny and wise, but all the poems are written with a sparkling clarity that throws light on their subject. Above all, she combines intellectual rigour with a feel for the sensuous textures of the real world.

 

Ann Drysdale

 
 

Her language moves with breath-taking ease from the wickedly witty to the elegiac, from sensual specifics – of the natural world or of human intimacy – to resonant abstraction.

 

Linda Saunders, cover of Taking Shape

 
 

Thin Ice: Review by Penelope Shuttle, ARTEMISpoetry Issue 5