poetry
THE SORROWS OF WOMEN
Dorothy Hewett
Tracy Ryan
Bluebeard in Drag
FACP $16.95pb, 76pp,
1 86368 134 5
IN TRACY RYAN'S POEMS there are no safe houses, the walls of domesticity keep falling in and she is the clear-eyed tightrope walker negotiating a perilous foothold. Her lines zigzag across the page:
The titles of her two collections are revealing. In both books there is a sense of the gothic, a darkness that must be confronted and overcome. Delilah is threatened with death but a female Bluebeard is a different proposition altogether. She carries her own implicit threat and the corpses in her house are her own. Here Cinderella, Jenny Craig, Jo March in Little Women, The Little Match Girl, Red Riding Hood, the grandmother and the wolf, with a bellyache from overeating, give this book an extraordinary taste of comic terror where anything might happen in stuffy rooms or around the next street corner.
Bluebeard in Drag uses as one of its epigraphs a quote from Alice Miller's 'Thou shalt not be Aware':
always the same
like hand over
so real
each scent
his beer breath
childHow can I be daughter mother wife
The power of these poems lies in their subject matter, their sharp imagery, their tense chopped off lines and their ferocious control. Bluebeard in Drag is Tracy Ryan's second collection. The first used a combination of myth, fairytale, and the ordinary to mine the terror and the inexplicable in female experience. Bluebeard in Drag is a stronger, tougher and, I think, wiser book. She understands more and is prepared, without equivocation, to tread the minefield of family relationships.
I'll shave
my head/collaborator
parade
our shame through streets
but the whole world
is Vichy. 'Generations'The victimisation of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it
The life of women is a life of secrets, of constant compromise. The moments are pinned down meticulously, snapshots caught at that point 'between smile and rage' -- the child learning to knit, the girl `shelling the days neatly as peas that will never reach the table', the Sheaffer pen signing away so much for `the men in suits'. When the poet leaves her psychiatrist's rooms there is `a very small voice/it's all that's left of her'.
But parents, siblings, and lovers are never demonised. There are moments of tenderness, of compassion, an understanding of human weakness, that fallibility we all share.
the weight
coming down
mouth
the rent
the pain
I can smell him
taste his
sweat 'Even by Day'
detached from
its parent
her sandalwood
perfume
drinks them in
like poison
can't tell
who's villain
who's victim 'Murder in the Dark'