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Hothouse
by Tracy Ryan
Arc International Poets series
Part of our Arc International Poets series
Hothouse, Tracy Ryan's most recent collection of poems, was published in 2002 in her native Australia to great critical acclaim. It is essentially a collection of flower poems which focus, not on the alienation of humans from the plant world, but instead their similarities.
In them we see the grafting of the organic world onto the personal, the emotional, the sexual, in language which is both 'bluntly luscious' (her own phrase) and at the same time 'pruned' into deceptively simple, short lines.
Hothouse is a collection of intense poems which explore with great precision the ever shifting and precarious boundaries between self and the world. Sometimes Tracy Ryan reminds me a little of Sylvia Plath — sometimes of Gig Ryan, but mostly she is her own self, dancing with a language forged in talent and courage.
This collection is rewarding on all levels — there is wit, beauty and some serious thinking. [Ryan] is never complacent about the work of poetry, but shows its role as inspiration and deflector of desire. Nowhere is this more evident than in her images of flowers...
Reading Hothouse is not like breathing hot air; rather, it is touching one by one the cool plants the hothouse produces, or looking from the outside in...
Paperback
84 pages
Size 138 x 216 mm
November 2006
ISBN 1-904614-13-2
Published November 2006
