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Author: Brendan Ryan

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mekong coconut workers

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 12 December 2016

    Watch the man in his stained shirt barefoot under the palms. Adrift from younger workers he manages a rhythm, a cigarette-dangling-from-the-lip focus. His lined face belies the strength of his forearms, thrusting each coconut onto a metal spike that is his altar. Seven days a week he splits coconuts with the precision required to not sever a wrist in a country with no health insurance. Upriver, in the seamy heat of the Mekong Delta, it could be the 19th century. I don't know where to look.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Car park hunger

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 26 August 2014
    1 Comment

    A topless man shuffles into Coles. The Big Issue seller is liked and avoided. Buskers who specialize with the night, streetlights mooning the spaces that never close.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The last talker after Mass

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 09 April 2013
    7 Comments

    The straggly lines of his arguments follow cow paths ... He laughs as much as he spits. Veins in his cheeks, grey hair testament to frosty mornings, a bull bowling his wife over in the yard ... My father had developed a bad habit of listening.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Supermarket and cemetery conversation

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 09 November 2010

    At the IGA, the woman at the check-out peppers her speech with Darl. Her friendliness, the way she packs my plastic bags, greets me two days later – a connection Facebook can’t provide.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lying in the confessional

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 01 September 2009
    2 Comments

    inventing sins to keep the peace .. Were the priests cheated too, as I was? .. Or did they come to trust a congregation .. by the stories told in confession?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Inventing terror

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 07 October 2008

    newspaper sub-headings — 'war on terror' .. each page apportioning blame .. every fridge doing its bit .. modest ceremonies for the men who jumped .. to enlist, to escape

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  • CONTRIBUTORS

    Brendan Ryan

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 17 May 2007

    Brendan Ryan's first collection of poetry, Why I Am Not a Farmer, was published by Five islands Press in 2000. A forthcoming poetry collection with Five Islands Press is due March 2007.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fluttering locusts stripping the paddocks bare

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 27 February 2007
    1 Comment

    Their flickering rises to a crescendo / unsettling, like a threat the ground / moves beneath me.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Talking to Auntie

    • Brendan Ryan
    • 05 June 2006
    1 Comment

    Poem by Brendan Ryan

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