By JOHN VAN KLAVEREN
HIGHTON poet and teacher Brendan Ryan knows he will never escape his Panmure dairy farming upbringing.
So the wordsmith uses his formative experiences to craft what reviewers have called “a clear-eyed and provocative vision” of the land and its farmers.
Mr Ryan’s fourth book of poetry, Traveling Through the Family, has been listed for the $25,000 Premier’s Literary Awards.
The book is also in contention for the main $100,000 award, Australia’s richest single literary prize.
And Geelong residents are being encouraged to vote for his work in the people’s choice award.
“You never know with these things. It’s great when it happens, but there’s some stiff opposition,” Mr Ryan acknowledged.
“You don’t write to get awards but there are so many books published these days and it’s nice to get some attention, make people aware of it and it promotes poetry as well.
“Books of poetry can be pretty invisible in bookshops these days, so anything promoting reading, study or literary appreciation is good.”
Mr Ryan said poetry was an under-appreciated art form, despite being one of the oldest forms of writing.
“Poetry was originally what everyone wrote, although people now prefer narratives and novels in stories.”
Mr Ryan said he began writing as a means of exploring the disconnection and contrast between city and rural life, having left the farm in his early 20s.
“It was something I always liked doing and I wanted to say a few things about the country while living in the city.
“The two are quite different lifestyles but have stereotypical views of each other. Writing about it was a way of opening that up.”
Award judges commented that Mr Ryan’s “coolly lyrical poems unfold a clear-eyed yet often wry view of the pragmatism implicit in rural survival, the brutality in animal treatment, the recognisable incidents in the rituals of extended family as well as some unsettling experiences engraved in history.
“Ryan commemorates a Victorian landscape that evolves in memory through carefully placed vernacular and precisely economical description, in which the past and present ultimately cohere into layered tolerance.”
