It's heartening to know that others have shared my admiration for Ryan's work - this collection was a deserving winner of the 2005 Anne Elder Award for a first collection.
Ryan has not, however, been idle in this interim period. As well as being a regular fixture at northern New South Wales poetry events, in 2002 Ryan and musician Cleis Pearce (ex-Mackenzie's Theory) collaborated on aural versions of some of these poems on the CD White Cow, a project that went on to win several music industry awards. For those who enjoy Rainswayed Night, I'd recommend they track down this audio recording for the sheer pleasure of hearing the gentle and modulated tones of the poet's voice enhanced by Pearce's sensitive violin, viola, drum and vocal backing.
This collection contains all the poems from White Cow, and a selection of newer pieces. The opening poem, 'Eagle', set in India, describes a moment when the poet, separated from his partner while hiking in the mountains, sees and chases after an eagle, 'a hard clear pulse on a wavering rock face', and runs after it along a ridgeline. It seems as if this poem serves as a metaphor for the poet's wanderings through life, chasing after the unobtainable, seduced by its beauty.
The remainder of the text is divided into six sections. The first, 'Rainswayed Night' is a series of sparse but moving pieces describing life-changing events from the poet's youth: a car accident, a period in an emergency ward, a long, slow recovery from head and spinal injuries, and the frustration of being immobilised. The second section, 'paper boy', takes us back further, to a childhood in Newcastle and an evocation of a child's impressions of life in that town in the 1950s. In 'The Hexham Flood', the child catches pneumonia and feels the river pulling him towards death in a first realisation of life's terror and unpredictability: '... the river was older than anything, / I knew it wanted me back. / At night a bubble grew inside, I felt the water rise.' (p.15-16).
He remembers gypsies visiting his parents' shop, seeing them dancing on Ash Island, and this fires the child's imagination with a desire to join them in their freedom: ' ... I remembered / how their voices stoked the tall flames. / I stirred that sound around my room / till fire shook and sparks roared up, / flew off and never stopped.' ('Gypsies', P.17-18). In the prose poem, 'Kenny' (p.19) we meet a misfit boy and see the child poet's sense of guilt as, unable to help him and driven by fear of difference, he escapes to the 'bright-lit doorway' where the safety of his mother and home await him. As the child grows he becomes a 'rainy day paper boy' (p.20).
The third section, 'black-crane kimono' examines man-woman relationships, periods of togetherness and separation, of longing and reunion. Particularly moving is 'outlaws' (p.28-29), a sad and poignant story of young love, telling of a girlfriend who embraced drugs ('the dealer came around, you took / the gifts he gave you till barbed hunger / took you by the arm', who went to 'a place i can't follow, / a trail fading down to the sea, / the flash of a cold rushing star'). The final piece in this section, 'all night the sea' contains five short stanzas describing being alone, waiting for news of an absent lover, and ending with a striking description of the need for human companionship.
Next, 'a ragged procession' describes aspects of the author's travels in Asia, with descriptions of sights and people. Ryan's blind singer says: 'I think you must pity me / ... if I could show you, / this garden whose ground is me! / ... / I still see / the colours made when darkness burns' (p.35), turning on its head notions of 'disability'. A white cow in Rajasthan appears disembodied against the fading evening light: '... the white cow holds / the day's last glow / against the darkening yard. / For a moment it floats / out there in the dusk / the only thing there is.' And with this vision, the poet traveller loses 'the need for bearings, the weight of miles' (p.38). In 'Dancer, Burning Ghat, Varanasi', the poet gives voice to a widowed man watching the flames take his wife's body as 'a ragged procession of sailboats roll in - / more wood for Yama's fires' (p.41). 'Coffee House, Janpath, New Delhi' describes an encounter with a Sikh fortune teller who predicts 'love soon to arrive', and the poet wryly notes '... a million sari princesses drift beyond my reach. / I have gazed at all the holy pools in India, seen only / my sad reflection. Once I shared a seat ... / with Krishna. He said he was tired of having to live forever; / his flute lay buried under three days' dirty washing.'
The collection ends with a trio of poems about father hood. In 'Merry-go-round', a weekend father watches his child riding a wooden horse. Mis-timing his wave, the child is disappointed. In the second stanza, the child rides on the carousel and the father waves 'right on time'. In the third, the adult child drives off in his P-plated car, and the poet writes 'You don't look back but I'm waving'. In this short poem, Ryan uses a small gesture, the act of waving, to compress all the joy and pain of watching children reach maturity, as well as pointing to the cyclical and ephemeral nature of life and growth (p.49). 'leaving newcastle' (p.50) echoes this poem, only this time the subject is the poet's ageing father and the memory of his gentleness, and how hard it is to be the adult driving away from a parent who is now himself childlike. The collection concludes with 'Somewhere on the Mount', where the poet returns to visit a widowed father who has become older and more eccentric, speaking in 'a high-pitched cackle'. The combined effect of these three pieces is a wide-ranging examination of father-son relationships that is poignant with both joy and loss.
Ryan's poems are spare but laden with meaning, highly polished and deeply felt. This collection touches on the big questions - life, death, love, loss, parenthood - but provides no easy answers, just an evocation of the ambiguities and pleasures encountered on life's journey. If you buy only one poetry book this year, make it Rainswayed Night.
(Reviewed by Liz Hall-Downs, June 2007)
