AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 1
Tracy Ryan
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of Tracy Ryan by Wendy J. Kinsella, 1998.
CH: What are you working on at the moment?
TR: A new novel (my third) with the tentative title Missing.
CH: What is your most memorable childhood incident?
TR: Watching the moon-landing on television in 1969, with my brother. A new baby sister was brought home from hospital on the same day and the two things kind of fuse in my mind as a big memory. I had an American uncle working for NASA who sent us lots of information about rockets and we were pretty space-mad. I suppose this is not really an incident but a kind of feeling.
CH: Name a piece of visual art that has touched you?
TR: Many things by Frida Kahlo. Some of Joy Hester. Lots of paintings, and sometimes photographs.
CH: If you had three wishes, what would they be?
TR: For my child to be happy and well throughout her life. For an end to cruelty and violence. For people to enjoy freedom.
CH: What are your favourite movies?
TR: This changes from time to time. I really like Agnieska Holland (Olivier, Olivier) and more recently I liked The Talented Mr Ripley and Memento.
CH: Have you ever been in a haunted house?
TR: Not that I know of. I lived in Katharine Susannah Prichard's former house and some have said that it's haunted, but I never experienced anything of that sort there.
CH: Do you believe in a power greater than yourself?
TR: Absolutely. I can't say more than to quote these two stanzas from Emily Bronte, if I may:
"Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath,
And what thou art may never be destroyed."
CH: Why is poetry important to you?
TR: Because it's part of that "Being and Breath"; because I love language(s). It has always seemed to me a natural and essential part of life. There are certain poets or poems I couldn't imagine living without - and certain things I could only "say" or "make" through poetry. It doesn't always change people, but it can. It can also help people survive.
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FRAGILE CYCLES
for David E. Musselwhite
Fourfold, the white spider orchid
repeats at the gateway
to the cemetery
where we didn't expect it
coming here nineteen
years now
where no one can really trespass
and the purple Curse
and the red-green flare of pain
of kangaroo paw
are even domestic
to this season -- surely
we have seen everything
there is to see here
our big lives were over
when we laid him down
and proved each bloom
transitory thereafter
predictable
as each shed cell
called it a cycle --
yet these small, sparse
tentative gestures
too new and artless for
flags of truce
take their place here
at the entrance
become now our point
of departure.
HYACINTHS
O you may wear your rue
with a difference
- Ophelia
You should have known
but there must be a first time
you don't see coming
turn on your heel
as if for a last
and futile glimpse
of your attacker
as if identification
could fix them
making you less
susceptible
but you are hooked now
these pastel barbs
deceptively soft
on a first encounter
dipped in the stuff
of swoons, Laertes' sword
you will come back
to black earth and
incredulity
how such beauty
could have been
forever
you will be waiting
for their return
STEALTH (from "IRIS POEMS")
Rhizomic, we know
no real separation -
like your gift of two stems
from the armful a woman
gave you in turn -
a lateral movement,
propagation
of understanding.
Untrammelled, they crowd
and must be divided,
heavy feeders.
In town they are regular
you wouldn't know
their nature -
the distance aesthetic
passion erotically stunted.
Somehow they recognise
each other.
I have no longer
any time or room for them
mother only now,
though they still catch me
springing out where
I never planted
queering the path after thaw
or sending a near relation
jonquil or freesia
to ruffle the surfaces.
AUSTRALIA
I'm looking at you with the squint
of distance and rapprochement, the way
we reappraise an ex
how did I ever
what was I thinking
and the tired old affection that
never quite fails us
you in your Anzac Day 'best', & I notice
you even manage a land-rights flag
up there among the
rain-flogged & flapping
bunting, though I know
underneath the sensitive-new-age act
you're still at it
with that woman the loo-walls call
'Sweaty Betty', your bit on the side
and the Yankee nuclear
floozies (a boot in every
port) not to mention domestic tyrannies,
will you ever grow up? but
no, you nations are all the same
whatever the name or rhetoric --
boys will be boys and the men
they're knocked into must have
their mid-life crises
some of us never did fit
the Bill Bloggs Joe Blow she'll be right
scenario, we were hoping for something
different, trying to stand on our own
thirty-six million or so feet.
Acknowledgments: Hothouse (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). |
About the Poet Tracy Ryan
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Tracy Ryan was born and grew up in Western Australia but now lives in England. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Literature, and has also studied European languages at the University of Western Australia. She has worked in libraries and at bookselling, taught at Curtin University of Technology, and edited poetry and fiction for magazines. Killing Delilah was shortlisted for the 1994 Western Australian Premier's Prize for Poetry and the John Bray Award, Adelaide Festival, 1996; Bluebeard in Drag was shortlisted for the 1997 Western Australian Premier's Prize for Poetry. She was joint winner of the 1996 Times Literary Supplement/Poems on the Underground short poem competition. |
[Above] Photo of Tracy Ryan by Wendy J. Kinsella, 1998.
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Thylazine No.3 (March, 2001) |
