AustLit

'Tracy Ryan’s 2015 poetry collection, Hoard, muses upon the bogs of the poet’s ancestral Ireland. In doing so, Ryan engages knowingly with a landscape already excavated and embraced in poetry, as Seamus Heaney repeatedly wrote about bogs and bog bodies, heeding a call to ‘Lie down / in the word-hoard’ (1992: 11). A bog, as Ryan explains in a note at the end of the collection, ‘is a kind of wetland, like a sponge full of water, composed of peat – dead, partly decayed plant matter built up over great lengths of time . . . These conditions mean that things found in bogs are often near-perfectly preserved – from ancient hoards of tools and jewellery to actual human bodies’ (2015: 49). A bog is thus an amalgamation of disparate temporalities and materialities. Organic and inorganic matter, water, earth and plant matter create an acidic environment deprived of oxygen, in which human and animal bodies, medieval weapons, bronze age collars, Victorian boots, and modern rubbish can co-exist silently, hidden. Bogs are thus uniquely illustrative examples of what Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann call ‘storied matter’: ‘a material “mesh” of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces’ (2014: 1-2). While for Iovino and Oppermann, all matter is storied, for poets such as Ryan and Heaney, the stories encased and layered in bogs are particularly enticing.' (Introduction)