Canberra: Recent Work, 2025, 245pp.
Brendan Ryan’s poetry has never been especially difficult to read but can be rather difficult to know how to write about. It’s not an uncommon problem and one sees it in writings about someone like Sharon Olds, a much-loved poet who smoothly turns her emotional life into memorable poems. There’s a similar evenness about Ryan’s output whose experimental ventures seldom go further than moving out of the first person into the third. It’s a personal poetry rarely venturing into broad statements about the current loony state of the world. But, paradoxically, it is the focus on the personal – on his upbringing on a western Victorian dairy farm, on family life – that, far from being repetitive or boring, digs deeper and more obsessively as the poetry goes along from book to book. I think he is best seen as someone driven by obsession. This might not have been apparent after his first couple of books, but it’s more clearly seen in this Selected which charts a writing career that has focussed on the same targets but also reveals that there is an individual self which has lived long enough to go through different stages so that the perspective on these subjects changes slightly. At any rate, the intensity of the concerns becomes more apparent.
Looked at literary-historically, Ryan is a late member of a “rural-background” school. I think of his poetry as relating to that of Philip Hodgins, Geoff Page, some of Geoffrey Lehmann and perhaps the Gary Catalano of Remembering the Rural Life. One of Ryan’s books, Small Town Soundtrack, quotes on its cover part of a review by Geoff Page, “His poetry, with its unflinching portrayal of dairy farming and associated small-town life, is surely essential reading for inner-city cafe habitués”. Though it is probably meant jovially, this looks like the final flickering of that old tension between city and bush. The godfather of “rural background” poets is, of course, Les Murray, but his sacralisation of bush and farming life is a long way from Ryan’s poetry. Murray’s great sequence about dairy farming, “Walking to the Cattle-Place”, built with a structure based on indigenous song-poems and deploying Vedic cattle-material amongst much else, is worth comparing to Ryan’s “Walking the Cattle Track” – one of the new poems in this Selected – whose title suggests that a knowing comparison is going on.
Those low sheltered spaces beneath cypress plantations where grass doesn’t grow and the cattle track hardens to the consistency of a cricket pitch. A dry sacramental place where cool air whispers beneath the outstretched limbs and Friesians sit chewing, swallowing, eyeing off the day. . . . . . I walk into the past and write into the present. The fireballs and scorching winds are a kind of discordant music to the slow lean of a fence. Memory is a mash-up of longing, forgetting and what is always there – rustling in a gum tree plantation thatched hoofprints of cows drying in mud the illusion of walking on air.
Yes, it’s described as a “sacramental” place but whereas Murray’s sequence is a matter of placing an ordinary event – walking to cattle – in as cosmic and sacred a frame as possible, Ryan’s poem is about the humbler issue of memory. “I walk into the past and write into the present” might well be the signature sentence of this Selected, despite the implication of its title – What It Feels Like – that it will be a book of poems that helps others – no doubt some of them “inner-city café habitués” – to understand what living in a small rural town and working a dairy farm is like at the visceral level: that is, of registering it poetically. The interaction of present life and memories of childhood is one of the driving forces behind Ryan’s poetry. And it isn’t always memories of the rural life. An early poem, “Return to the Western District”, details the experience of revisiting home, a process that reminds him that the Western District is a place of darkness, full of histories that he didn’t know as a child and doesn’t know now. But the poem’s end:
. . . . . Each time I return certain objects are caught: green algae in a water trough, a cattle track rising out of river flats. So much slips from that first glance I can’t pick up everything that falls. In the quiet paddocks that have been shut up for hay all I can hear are sirens, Punt Rd traffic. . .
can be read as inverting the situation so that it is the memories of the city, his current location, which impose themselves, rather than the reverse. Memory, in other words, isn’t a matter of something from the past brought into the mind in its present state. It is something more like the overlay of two modes of existence which, though they are different, still have a relationship to one another.
So the subjects of Ryan’s poetry don’t really change: a catholic-childhood rural life which determines, at least to an extent, the person he is today; which imposes itself as memories but as memories which reveal how much of that conception of his childhood elides the secret events of the place where he lived; which determines, at least to some explorable extent, the degree to which his present self is created by that childhood, an especially important question given how brutal the dealings of a child on a dairy farm can be. But there is a new element here, one that can be observed in a number of poets whose work details events in their lives: that is the issue of ageing. Instead of a poetry which focusses on a particular subject and which might rise, in the odd case, to the poetically more interesting status of obsession, we get a diachronic perspective. The self changes (or develops, or expands, or contracts) with age and so a basic question like “I am formed by my childhood which I remember constantly, but to what extent?” gets asked by what is becoming a slightly different self. This is the real meaning, I think, behind the statement, “I write into the present”.
It is something we can see in the portrayal of his parents. They first appear in poems of early domestic memories like, “The View” from A Paddock in His Head or “Travelling Through the Family” from the book of that name. Memory tends to be static, to resolve itself as single images: the mother looking out through the window or the father returning from work at an abattoir. But when the book is read as a whole, there is a strong dynamic in such representations: parents get old, get sick and die. In Ryan’s previous book, Feldspar, there are a number of portraits of them in their late phase. In “The Parents”, for example, we have a precise description:
. . . . . He steps bow-legged towards the fridge. A litre and a half of soda water blister pack of coloured pills and he is pushing his chair back from the table, fox-eyed. My mother reads local newspapers into the night. Footy scores ignite her. She takes out her hearing aid to doze, talk on the phone “Go on with you, you’re a good one to talk.” My father offers a conspiratorial smile later, confides, “she’s the best little worker I’ve known” . . .
By the time of the new poems in this Selected, both parents are dead, “The Roster” detailing his father’s time in palliative care. For the reader who reads this book from beginning to end, it’s an unsettling experience, not to see characters age but to see them move from being static figures in a poem concentrating on a memory to actual human beings near the end of their lives. It’s as though they emerge into the present and into reality through time. And it reflects the tensions at the heart of Ryan’s poetry: memory comes from a “walk into the past” and is apt to “capture” and freeze situations. But people, even poets, live in a continuously evolving present whose keynote is change.
I should say something about the world of Ryan’s childhood, recalled in these poems of memory. It is a dairy-farming life in Western Victoria. For most readers it is likely to be the images of the violence and professional cruelty of this life that stay with us – beating a crippled calf to death in “A Job to Do”, for example – but the overall picture which the poems build up is a very complex one. It’s a devoutly Catholic family, for a start, and one wonders how representative this is and how much it affects the experience. It’s also a world where the humbler end of Australian Rules football is an important source of social cohesion. But more importantly, as many of the poems point out, it is a society of silences and secretiveness. Sometimes this is because parents don’t tell their children awkward facts about what neighbours are up to because they feel that it is inappropriate for children to know such things. But other poems record events which on the outside make little sense. In “The Lowlands of Moyne”, for example, we get a catalogue of these lives, these “dark” stories:
Mud darkening the stories what’s passed down utterances, quips a way of looking at fences the dark stretches a scattering of bricks where a dairy was. Farmhouses facing narrow back roads wrecks of Commodores dumped in cape weed beside rusted sheds. Heavy country you could fatten a bullock with. A mother into farm politics and the boot-deep mud around her dairy. There were three brothers who drank day and night until they killed themselves. A mother who burned her house down before leaving her husband . . .
A semi-comic poem, “She was a Mugavin”, is a rehearsal, perhaps from a mother’s point of view, of an endless series of marriages and name changes.
The hidden quality of the social background means that the memories of childhood are very slightly compromised. They are not able to give anything like enough background to make a complete picture. The book’s title poem, “What It Feels Like”, is a statement that the environment, or the memories of that environment, are always fragmented and incomplete:
It is two fathers punching each other in the footy sheds shadows extending over the river flats over the bachelor nursing a long neck on his porch over the epileptic twisting on the mechanic’s floor. It is a chorus of crows in the red gums by the river. It is a woman avoiding loose gravel on the road to her lover . . . .
The loose gravel on this road reminds us how significant roads are in Ryan’s poetry. They come in two main varieties. First there are the roads that lead back from the city to the farm for one of his revisits. These are roads that awaken memories. Then there are the roads, the back roads – often gravel – of the communities themselves. It may just be a personal response, as someone with a semi-rural upbringing (though a sugarcane one), but this resonates. Back roads, which often lead down to water and which only locals know and use are a powerful image of the rural life. One of Ryan’s best poems, the lengthy “Back Roads, Local Roads” from A Paddock in His Head, explores the phenomenon from the point of view of the method by which locals travel and a revisiting son has his memories stirred, where the “gravel edges” are as “unreliable as the images I cling to // back roads enclosing us like growth rings on a tree”. But these roads are also as a symbol of the behind-the-scenes connections in a rural area: connections that lead to the marriages, outrages and suicides.
“Philip Hodgins” from Travelling Through the Family describes two dreams involving that poet. In the second, the dying Hodgins, challenges Ryan to continue his work of detailing the rural life, a challenge that Ryan feels himself not up to. Ryan seems to me in every sense apart from his material, a different poet to Hodgins who always has a sense of pugnaciousness in his poems, sometimes explicit, sometimes under the surface. Ryan seems, in contrast, a poet of genuine personal obsessions, turning over in poem after poem, the issues of a dairying background and its influence, the role of his parents, their religion, the roles of “footy” and popular music. The keynote to his poetry is, I think, not the rural material but rather the continuous process of revolving in his poems the experience and the significance of the issues about his self that it involves. He is remarkably non-judgemental which is an achievement for someone coming from a place where narky arguing is common (it’s well-described in the poem, “Hard Worker”). Obsession moves him beyond the value judgements and polemical undertones of someone like Murray. This material is so present, so much in the forefront of his mind from day to day, so much in need of exploration, that it makes comparisons and judgements between rural and urban life seem trivial and inappropriate.
