Tracy Ryan



Review Short: Tracy Ryan’s The Water Bearer

‘… the poem / will cover a multitude of signs.’ This line, appearing early in West Australian author Tracy Ryan’s ninth poetry collection, can be read as connecting directly to what’s been posited as the very purpose of poetry: to confound or thicken language, to free it from its mere communicative dimension, as Walter Benjamin might put it, and allow it to bump up against things-in-themselves.

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The House, Cracking

Enough to wake the deepest sleeper though still out there by day I’m more attentive lying down by dark the strain of stillness in between each strike a load to bear as if some bone inside were close to fracture …

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Etruscan Love Song

Give me your best archaic smile the one that others think to understand though truly mute and private since you know whatever we were or are or will be is not here This is a likeness reconstituted after shattering A …

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Activist Journal: Ireland and Germany Extraction, 2015-16

18/9/2015 Rosewood, Schull, Co. Cork, Ireland. Difficult and full fortnight of work coming up before I have to travel solo to London on bus, ferry and train.

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Chloe Wilson Reviews Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones

These two slender and handsomely designed volumes of poetry are the result of the closely con-tested 2014 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, of which Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones were joint winners.

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Marion May Campbell Launches Tracy Ryan’s Hoard

Tracy Ryan, whose new and eighth full-length poetry collection we’re celebrating, Hoard is also a four-time novelist (Vamp, Jazz Tango, Sweet, Claustrophobia), a memoirist and translator. Her work has been acclaimed in multiple commendations and short-listings and has received the …

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OBSOLETE Editorial

‘Obsolete’ can only be neutral or pejorative; it is never a compliment. Even those who value the old, the superseded object or mode, are reinstating it so as to deny that the object or mode is obsolete. I can still use it.

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Submission to Cordite 49: OBSOLETE Open!

Tracy Ryan in Western Australia Submission to this issue is now closed. Cordite 50: NO THEME IV with John Tranter is now open. Poetry for Cordite 49: OBSOLETE is guest-edited by Tracy Ryan What is obsolete? Are you obsolete … …

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Cassidy on with Feature Reviews and Future Themes

The bad news first … I am sorry to see the departure of Lisa Gorton as Cordite’s Feature Reviews Editor. Over the past 18 months, her astute eye, impeccable judgement and gracious style has produced – and leaves us with – a superb legacy of robust and engaging feature reviews. Gorton’s work is testament to what can happen with excellent writing from reviewers and an engaged editorial acumen.

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Spoon Bending: A Chapbook Curated by Kent MacCarter

There is no such thing as a good poem about nothing? What does that mean, exactly? And what’s all this about spoon bending anyways?

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Companion Poems     from the French

apricot asparagus baba bald man in a polo neck basket bamboo boutique bar bean blind man on wheels bonhomme brackmard brush snake cat cigar with a moustache crackette crossbow custard puff pastry daisy dart earthworm fig firebrand grinder/gripper hot water …

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Review Short: Tracy Ryan’s Unearthed

Tracy Ryan’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Unearthed, comprises of an extraordinary series of elegies and elegiac poems. The elegiac mode here is both intimate and epic in scale. These poems commemorate the most private moments shared with lost lovers – those times ‘relished and wasted’ (12), ‘snug’ in ‘coffin-dark’ beds (32) – as well as the ways in which our inhabited environments – mountains, the plant and animal worlds, even glimpses of the moon – are ghosted by the dead.

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Mother Tongues

Most of the time we lived in mine or appeared to you had been here as long as I had, arrived in my birth-year, but had to wear it in second skin (your sixth, if we count unspoken Classics) though …

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Michael Farrell Reviews Fremantle Poets 1: New Poets

There is an apt awkwardness and uncertainty in all three poets – Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, J.P. Quinton – here: in the expression of sentiment (‘Preparations’, Rooksby), in the use of syntax (Mitchell) and archaisms like ‘verily’ (Quinton). All three are skilled poets, but they are new, and there is a sense that they are still trying things out. As editor Tracy Ryan writes, the three are ‘extremely diverse in tone and approach’ and this diversity is pronounced in a way that would be tempered were there more poets in the book. Ryan’s selected poets represent three modes, rather than merely variety itself. This is not a sampler, however, but three books in one, and perhaps not designed to be read sequentially.

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Rain

‘Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain’ – GM Hopkins 1 You drive as the rain drives now steady now squalling a car full of storm and vespers One voice in the mass seeks you out and …

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