Gig Ryan

There is an inwardness to Ryan’s work, somewhere between revelry and a caustic self-regard, that peels back the subject while also peeling back the accretions of language and culture that form the subject. She couples the vernacular of the urban with a fitful journey through Western myths, consumer culture and references to a suburban world that often appears as an underworld, an emaciated hell (see ‘Interest Rates’ and the grimly funny ‘Global Rewards Redemption Centre’). Middle-class preoccupations – interest rates, mortgage, the kids – provide a backdrop, if not target, for a poetry not given to mercy or vain sentimentality.

Along the razor of its depiction of inner-city life, there is a mournfulness, both bleak and filled with honest emotion, in much of Ryan’s work. More the demotic of a dystopia than the vernacular of a republic, Ryan’s use of language – its truncation, tautness and drama – cuts equally across the body politic and the scene of poetry. Throughout all of this, her humour, insight and tight music both test and engage the reader. She gives street-learning a classical voice; post-modernism, experience. Bibliography
Poetry
The Division of Anger, 1981
Manners of an Astronaut, 1984
The Last Interior, 1986
Excavation, 1990
Research, 1998
Pure and Applied, 1998
Heroic Money, 2001


Recordings
Disband: Six Goodbyes, 1988
Driving Past: Real Estate, 1999
Driving Past: +CD, 2001

Link

In English
Lyrikline
The author reading from her work.