Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #8/thyla8i-trbook
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
Hothouse by Tracy Ryan reviewed by Sharon Olinka
(Fremantle Arts Centre Press, North Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia, 2002, $19.95)
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The cold tone of these poems initially put me off a bit; nearly repelled me. Technically, they're close to perfect. Emotionally, I wanted to be somewhere else when I read them, perhaps dining with Roethke, or in his own greenhouse. Roethke's plant-world is hot; visceral, sexual, visual, and musical. A riot of color, smells, and memories. Ryan's plant world is made for academics. It has references. It's carefully coded, and politically correct.
But I wouldn't go there by choice, and I wouldn't bring it home. It mocks me somehow for being human, as if being merely human wasn't enough. |
In the poem "She gives" the image of a ripe mango triggers off stanzas that editorialize rather than transform, and turn the poem banal in the last stanza.
"such an embarrassment
of riches, roundly
voluptuous, I must
control this gift you bring
with poem and knife
and anecdote
reduce the fruit
hypostasise
the feeling -
too much to manage alone
too gross for metaphor."
I don't believe this passage; it sounds fake, in a particularly self-serving way, but so clever I'm sure it will have at least a dozen imitations. The poem concludes, "the mango is merely there/ bluntly luscious/ already more/ than eaten." It is, however, a mango with stopped-up juices. A museum mango. A mango in a bell jar.
Along with the fruit, flower, and vegetable conceits, there are several brilliant poems related to travels in England and Ireland. These are poems that sing, and speak simply in a universal language. "Dublin" is a particularly fine poem, with the imagery of an exquisite etching.
- "furnishing ghost and bone
impossible place
city of sun
through smoky glass."
The rhymes of "home", "own", and "known" are effective within the poem, the off-rhyme of "church' and "reach", and the poetic tensions are also well-served by the short, clipped stanzas, which are characteristic of Ryan's style. I like to think of them as coiled springs. They have a powerful, dark, and self-sustaining energy, like all of the poems in the book. And if I prefer some poems over others, so be it; it's not to say that I dismiss Ryan as a poet, what she dredges up from the depths. Quite the contrary. I have been some dark places myself, and because of that, when I bring up one rock, one memory, one dead fish eye, I am careful not to sugar-coat it with aesthetics. I want it to hurt. I want the reader to feel it without elaborate semiotic filters, if at all possible - which is difficult to do, in these days when poets insist on framing, naming, and explaining. But when a poet hits just the right note, it's thrilling - and if Ryan knows how to say "noli me tangere", she also knows to disturb the air we breathe, occasionally give us a bit of truth that mingles beauty and strangeness to perfection.
As in these lines from "Moreton Bay Figs":
"The parrots are at it again -
too quick for the camera
or I might send you
a glimpse of heaven, bereft,
rent and put back again.
How deftly they sever and get
to the gist of things, the unpicking
how systematic.
But the tree's skin
is thick and the heart unshaken."
(Reviewed by Sharon Olinka, September 2003)
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Thylazine No.8 (September, 2003) | |
