Feldspar by Brendan Ryan, Recent Work Press, 2023

Since the year 2000 with the publication of Why I am not a Farmer Brendan Ryan has been ploughing his own fertile patch of the poetic landscape. Feldspar, his seventh collection, (aside from the evocatively titled memoir Walk Like a Cow) treads familiar terrain. Any why not? Dorothy Hewett consistently returned to the West Australian wheat fields of her youth. So too, Ryan returns to the remembered territory of his past.

This idea of returning forms one of the central tropes of Feldspar in both a figurative and literal sense. Many of these poems revisit scenes of the past, of the casual rituals of life down on the farm. He does this without any conscious sense of nostalgia. Or not much. Ryan’s tone is far more subtle. While he eschews any formal experimentation, there is a quiet, emotive power in the simplicity of his language. A modern sensibility is at work here. This love of simplicity is brought to life by Ryan’s attention to detail, both rural and domestic.

/ He blows on the corners
when he turns the pages of a newspaper.

The poems are rich with vivid imagery. They do not sugar coat the intrinsic violence of farming life, for example what to do with a dog that gets a taste for blood. Ryan confronts this violence face to face. Yet the poet in him is challenged ‘by the need to look away.’ One wonders what his family may have thought about him scribbling verses instead of presumably lending a hand and mucking in. There is plenty of mucking in. Ryan is not afraid of getting his hands dirty and these poems speak from a lived experience.

/ pulling a dead lamb from a ewe
pushing a prolapsed uterus back in by hand.

Ryan is sympathetic to the various plights of the farmer rather than judgmental of seeming acts of cruelty and violence. These are necessary facts of life. Ryan seems to be suspended between two worlds – the old dichotomy of the city, where he lives, and the farm, which he visits and mourns.

City poets look at you, smile, but their eyes are elsewhere.

The portraits of his family and other characters are affectionately drawn in what become a gradual acceptance of their encroaching loss, namely loss of a way of life, a romanticised notion which Ryan keeps under cool control. He doesn’t sink to the maudlin. In this respect there are several character-based narratives not dissimilar to the poetic narratives of Frost or Edgar Lee Masters which engage with a colloquial voice rather than a lyrical one.

Farming is not Ryan’s exclusive domain. A variety of subject matter is evident, often emerging from the juxtaposition of metropolitan and rural imagery. There is a broad range of concern within the seemingly inexhaustible field of the farming trope. Elsewhere common domestic images, such as grocery shopping or hanging out the washing are endowed with a significance greater than these lone images might possess at face value. When Ryan moves away from the specific focus he casts on the farming world the language becomes slightly more prosaic, conversational. Nevertheless the tone is subtle, understated, like visiting an old friend with their kitchen sink advice:

You’ve got to push and shove and grunt and heave in life –
that’s all you have to do.

In fact the titles of most of his poems are very down to earth. In this regard Ryan embraces the holiness of the everyday, seeking out the sacred in the mundane.

the backyard fence that has become /
……………………another altar I return to.

The idea of returning as a religious rite is a recurring one. In a literal sense this frequently involves the act of driving: driving between the rural landmarks of city and home, for it is clear his heart belongs in the bush.

I drive to return to what takes me away.

There are several descriptions of roads, vehicles, truck drivers, roundabouts, landmarks. Many poems take the form of a narrative return whereby past memories are aligned with current points of view. Other recurring images include light (mentioned six times in one poem), and (no surprise) paddocks.

‘Paddock’ was apparently the favourite word of the tragically short-lived Philip Hodgins. The poems in Feldspar are often very Hodgins-like in the specificity of their particular field of enquiry. Hodgins, (on whose work Ryan has published) is a perennial influence. And why not? Every poet has influences. While both poets are ostensibly concerned with farming, beneath the rural imagery something else is going on. With Hodgins it was the encroaching matter of his own death. With Ryan it is concern with the aging of his world, his parents in particular, and the gradual loss of the way of life he remembers.

Each time I am with them, I become a different person.
I find my way by their politics, side-stepping the bait
I return to shouting with their friends about football,
rain before nosing about my father’s rusting tools.

In his book Lineations Robert Gray attributes Hodgins with saying ‘Tell them I was a great hater.’ [p. 74]. Similarly, Ryan has his own pet hates articulated in the vernacular loathing of The truck driver’s lament, which bemoans the slow death of community values, and also his derision at Australians traveling overseas. There is even a clear allusion to Hodgins’ masterly Shooting the Dogs, examining the special place farm dogs, (or indeed any dogs) have in the lives of their owners and what to do with them once their usefulness is outlived. The ghostly echo of scratching claws appears in both – against a shovel in one, and on the floorboards in Ryan’s All her glories. It is the ongoing homage to Hodgins that informs Ryan’s poems about farming. This is where his language sings. With the legacy of Hodgins behind him Ryan has carved out his own niche within which his poems shine and the reader is engaged. The lens he applies to rural life is his own. His poems are as clear and moving as Hodgins were harrowing.

 – Mark O’Flynn

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Mark O’Flynn’s novel The Last Days of Ava Langdon (UQP) was short listed for the Miles Franklin Award, 2017. A collection of short stories Dental Tourism appeared in 2020. His recent collections of poems are Undercoat, (Liquid Amber Press, 2022), and Einstein’s Brain (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022).

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Feldspar by Brendan Ryan is available from https://recentworkpress.com/product/feldspar/ 

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