Willing Eye

by Tracy Ryan

In these powerful poems, the nettle sting, the splinter, the milk tooth and the love bite, the acts of translation, are borderline experiences that become sacramental, while physical states-myopia, childbirth, speed, and prostration-create their own knowledge, as vital as what the eye takes in and the heart grieves over. This is a book open to the shocks and pleasures of seeing and daily life, driven by a fascination with the shifting and precarious boundaries between self and world.

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

Tracy Ryan is a Western Australian poet and novelist. She was particularly well-known in the 1990s as a trailblazing feminist poet, with early collections as 'Killing Delilah' and 'Bluebeard in Drag'. Such poetry collections reflected the fraught nature of the the times regarding the end of second-wave feminism, through her experiences as poet, woman, mother, partner and the inhabitant of politicised body in a politicised space.

Ryan has worked various jobs in libraries, bookselling, editing, community journalism and university teaching. She has a BA in English from Curtin University, studied European languages at the University of Western Australia, and finished with a BA (Hons) in French from the University of New England in NSW. She is especially interested in foreign languages and the translation of poetry.

Ryan's poetry has been compared, by poet Dorothy Hewett, with Sylvia Plath, and Debra Zott, in her review of Hothouse, agrees, saying that "certainly, there are [in Ryan's poetry] the mythic underpinnings one finds in Plath's poetry, as well as that quality of imbuing the personal with highly dramatised mythic proportions" and that "it is no secret that Ryan has been influenced by Plath". However, she argues that "the very mention of Plath's name shapes, and threatens to place limits on, the reader's experience of Ryan's poetry", that "Tracy Ryan's poetry does not need the Plath myth to prop it up".

In 2001, Ryan said the following about her writing in a session with the Virginia G Piper Centre for Creative Writing:

I don’t adhere to any particular school of thought, except in the broadest sense that my writing is inextricably bound up with my feminism. This would be the only real connector between my books. I am interested in trying to find ways in which language may be interrupted, disrupted and rejigged for feminist purposes (among others). Usually this attempt would arise from something in either my personal life or the world around me. My home state is currently enacting a legal clamp-down on women, with regard to street prostitution—passing laws that restrict women’s movements and rights to occupy space. Though such factors are often what ‘provokes’ me into a poem, the poem equally draws life off other books (like most poets, I spend a lot of time reading). I work by a kind of principle of immersion in particular poets at particular times."

Notable awards and short-listings:

Western Australian Premier’s Book Award, Poetry (Shortlisted 2014)

NSW Premier’s Literary Award, Kenneth Slessor Prize (Shortlisted 2012)

Western Australian Premier’s Book Award, Poetry (Winner 2012)

Australian Book Review Poetry Prize (Winner 2009)

The Age Book of the Year Award, Poetry (Shortlisted 2008)

Trudie Graham Award for Memoir (Winner 2007)

Western Australian Premier’s Book Award (Winner 2000)

National Book Council’s Banjo Award (Commended 1997)

Western Australian Premier’s Book
Award (Shortlisted 1994, 1998)

Mattara Poetry Prize (Winner 1987)