The Westerly Centre would like to welcome local poet James Quinton to our team. James will be assisting our editor Tony Hughes-D'Aeth in researching a literary history of the Western Australia wheatbelt.

James has written an insightful review of Tracy Ryan's new collection, The Argument, which can be found on his blog. His own poetry has been published by Fremantle Press and in numerous chapbooks.

Here is an extract of the review:

For me ‘The Argument’ works in a three-fold process: a eulogistic exploration of Ryan’s collective eschatology, a dynamic identification of the cosmology we seek to understand, and the ways we may attempt to gain clues and build evidence about the cosmic cycle and cosmic error through the banal and the monumental:

I say he because the you of any elegy
is faceless, interchangeable, but this is beyond what person,
tense or mood can manage anyway, it is a long conversation
only the smashed syntax of a poem might sustain,
or appear to; for the dead, especially the young,
the sudden, the too-soon, every line written
is recrimination, cruel ambiguity, the phrase
I survive you.

(-Persistance, pg.63)