What if Feels Like brings together poems published over the past twenty-five years from Brendan Ryan’s seven poetry collections, as well as introducing thirty new poems. Ryan’s poetry has long been recognised for its varied use of poetic forms, the laconic musicality of its language, its incisive clarity and direct address to a reader. Rural life, in particular dairy farming, has never been written about with such a critical and memorable style. Over the course of seven poetry collections, Ryan has critiqued and celebrated his connections to his family farm, the back roads and small towns of the Western District, cows, and underpinning such examinations are a series of new poems honouring his late father. This is a poetry of empathy and longing, elegies and portraits written with a gentle irony. What it Feels Like is an essential contribution to ‘the tradition of hard pastoral’ in contemporary Australian poetry.
‘Brendan Ryan embraces the holiness of the everyday, seeking out the sacred in the mundane.’
Mark O’Flynn
‘Ryan’s poems are deceptively quiet, casual, vernacular, but their ironic subtlety often takes in the wide world beyond his backyard’
David Gilbey
‘These 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.’
Judges’ comments, 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards