Unearthed (Tracy Ryan, Fremantle Press)

‘Now you are dead perhaps we can really talk.’ Ryan’s last poetry collection, The Argument, won the WA Premier’s Book Award for poetry and her previous volume, Scar Revision, was shortlisted in the Age Book of the Year Awards. Unearthed is a surprising and candid collection—Ryan’s seventh—in which the poet exhumes both lost emotion and, in a major sequence of monologues, the spirit of a deceased lover. If ever there was a demonstration of how poetry can best address the intricacies of our emotional lives, this collection provides it. Ryan, a surefooted poet with a gift for striking precision and clarity, is not afraid to delve into her memories to explore a previous marriage made suddenly poignant by the discovery—after the fact—of her former husband’s death. Should we commemorate our failed relationships? And, if so, how? Ryan is determined she must try, and the results of her reflection amount to a tribute of a kind: if not to the man himself, then certainly to their past life, muddy, passionate, frustrating and vivid. This is a work that causes us to ponder how much of the past stays with us as we age. Ryan’s moving and profound work suggests, as William Faulkner famously observed, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

Andrew Wilkins is director of independent press Willkins Farago and a former publisher of Books+Publishing

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews