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Brendan Ryan

Camellias by Brendan Ryan

by
April 2014, no. 360

I take a straw broom to the damp leaves on the side path.
The concrete pavers are stained and dirty as they have been
for much of the year. Stooping allows me to see

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Fire Diary by Mark Tredinnick

by
September 2011, no. 334

Mark Tredinnick’s much-anticipated first collection of poetry, Fire Diary, is an examination of place and how to respond to it. The title provides a clue to the form of the book; many poems chart the daily exigencies of living within nature. More importantly, the collection explores the moods and aspirations of the self ...

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I walk toward a paddock bordered by cypress trees.
Philip Hodgins is on a tractor harrowing forty acres.
I can’t see his face but I know it is him
methodically going about his business,

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Past the final service station
into the green beyond of paddocks
soon to be carved up, quartered,
then watched over by streetlights.
In the post-work haze, nostalgia reigns:
lonely crossroads, abandoned weatherboards,
paddocks stretching down to the sea.

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A Slant of Light by Paul Kane & A Tight Circle by Brendan Ryan

by
October 2008, no. 305

Anthony Lynch, enterprising editor of the notable but short-lived Space magazine, also produces signed, limited-edition chapbooks under the moniker of Whitmore Press. Paul Kane’s A Slant of Light and Brendan Ryan’s A Tight Circle join a list that features Maria Takolander’s Narcissism and Cameron Lowe’s Throwing Stones at the Sun (both 2005).

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There has been something of a fashion in recent years to dismiss what might loosely be called ‘rural’ poetry because the vast majority of Australians live in cities near the coast. Nevertheless, ‘rural’ poetry keeps appearing, and not just in the works of Les Murray. A considerable number of Australian poets are only one generation away from the land (even John Tranter was born in Cooma), and their childhood memories can often be a rich resource. Admittedly, there are not many actually working it; the reasons for this are often at the core of their poetry. A few perhaps are inclined to be nostalgic (even sentimental) but there is also, as Craig Sherborne has observed, an ‘anti-pastoral strain in Australian poetry’. Among the more recent exponents of this tradition are the late Philip Hodgins, John Kinsella (in his wheat belt poems) and, to judge from A Paddock in His Head, the Victorian poet Brendan Ryan.

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Hooded eyes, eyelashes thinning, she tailgates a semi,
keeping up with him in case she breaks down.
The truckie has her measure in his rear-view mirror –

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Geoff Page’s latest poetry collection is a wide-ranging survey of some of the issues affecting contemporary Australian life. Underpinning Page’s poems of cafés, apartments, classical music, outback murders and domestic violence is a meditation on approaching mortality and the very idea of belief. In Page’s previous collection, Darker and Lighter (2001), the troubling nature of belief was hinted at in ‘Credo’: ‘The dark-night-of-the-soul-agnostic / prefers the right to doubt. / The world’s too much beset by those / who know what they’re about.’ Five years later, Page’s reflections on belief and the loss thereof return like echoes from a bell. In the fine poem ‘At Tosolini’s’, Page contrasts the diners’ penchant for coffee with the sound of bells ringing at a nearby church: ‘The sound of bells in autumn air / has long since been a thing / that we can never quite believe / and yet we don’t despair.’ Page’s use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ assumes much, and perhaps speaks for those who no longer believe.

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canola’s chemical yellow rises above the fence line
Black Poles laze around a dam, ibis and egrets gliding overhead
wattle, casuarina, eucalypt, cypress, radiata

where the bitumen gives way to gravel
taking you deeper into shadows, ditches
tinder undergrowth of a bush block

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While my brother milks
I return to mist drifting up the fence posts.
The night’s sheet slowly evaporating
giving in to day – already a process of action.

Cows backing off the platform
make their way up the track –
the stumps of their tails flicking at flies
they regard me with surprise.

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