Graham John Rowlands (born 1947) is an Adelaide-based poet who has published widely in magazines and newspapers since the late 1960s.
Rowlands is originally from Brisbane, moving to South Australia's capital in the early 1970s, publishing seven poetry collections in the two decades that followed, including Stares and Statues in 1972.
He has remained a person and a writer who fits generally within the traditions of the left, although he has expressed admiration for the work of Les Murray, generally considered Australia's best known poet, who is on many aesthetic and social dimensions aligned with the right.
These include the historian and writer Humphrey McQueen and poet/novelists Rodney Hall .
He often begins his poems with elegant abstract images, such as in his early poem LIVES: As the elegant table-leg of the eagleHolds a ball in its talons…[1]Then finishes the poem sudden personal intensity: I, who see in Orange lava below the crustMy hot fluid self burning,Moving and burning alive in my skin.