The Argument

by Tracy Ryan

Poems of keen appraisal and survival, bound by a cohesive vision, form this collection, which features the work of Australian poet Tracy Ryan. Revealing the poet's preoccupation with mortality, this compilation deals with the cold cross-examiner death by responding with life.

97 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2011

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)

Reviews

[Emmeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don't read a lot of poetry, and although I know how to recite it, i don't really know what makes good poetry and what makes bad poetry. however - this is good poetry. this is good writing. i know it is. it has to be. i loved every second.

[Jess Checkland · Rating 4 out of 5]

“She would like to go back twenty years and touch things up not a complete scrape-off, no pasting over, not white herself out like Branwell ghosting in that clumsy pillar of the Bronte family portrait, no, not to misrepresent, but to feel it was not set like that, time’s fixative, time’s gloss, still amateur as she always was but newly retrospective, if I’d known then what I know now” p. 47

Supple poems, both powerful and deeply moving. Themes of love, death, parenthood, identity and loss, alongside everyday experiences.