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‘A house before dawn’

Tracy Ryan’s poetics of domesticity and precarity
by
July 2022, no. 444

Rose Interior by Tracy Ryan

Giramondo, $24 pb, 112 pp

‘A house before dawn’

Tracy Ryan’s poetics of domesticity and precarity
by
July 2022, no. 444

Umberto Eco once described the text as a ‘lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work’; to contribute, in other words, to the production of meaning. Poetry has a particular reputation for being demanding, but Tracy Ryan’s tenth poetry collection, Rose Interior, isn’t challenging in the way that Eco envisages. It is less about engaging readers in the masculinist energy of the ‘machine’ and ‘work’ than about inviting them into a feminine world of domestic spaces and quotidian phenomena. If a reader were to conceptualise the text in the way that Eco describes, the engine for Rose Interior might be located in a poem called ‘Request’, where the poet announces her interest in whatever is

little and liminal,

won’t take much space, the odd
moment you think of ...  / or don’t,

whatever you wouldn’t look twice at ...

Maria Takolander reviews 'Rose Interior' by Tracy Ryan

Rose Interior

by Tracy Ryan

Giramondo, $24 pb, 112 pp

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