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 poems were also featured in Open-mouthed (Prospect Books 2006) and included in Images of women (Arrowhead Press 2006), Cracking On (Grey Hen Press 2009) and Confluence (Leaf Books 2010) and various other anthologies.
 
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, 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, and How Do I Love Thee.
 
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 She has three unpublished novels languishing on the shelf, and a handful of short stories.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.
 

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

Thin Ice: Review by Penelope Shuttle, ARTEMISpoetry Issue 5