Gig Ryan

Language: english

Translations: german (Elektra zu Klytämnestra)

Electra to Clytemnestra

Your jewels and cut and my chopped dress
and awkward husband
in the lounge where he slinks
in a puff of
Hansel and Gretel jump from the idling ute
Sliced moon, you frolic
and robes sass my dirt floor
while I tear my hair, my brother’s footprints chip
and old flowers drop as you crony
through pamphlets of behaviour
for your blow-in – old admirer in his hushed shirt
proffering a bar stool while my herd goats bleat

Aztec’d life of laurels and libations
who died in the cause
I texta out stains and mistakes on my clothes
and pan the earth for ribboned hope
apart, a clue, his grassy voice cracked like an axe
or false memory that shoos you to a bride
A king at work a cairn at home
when night clumps like a jigsaw
You choose the finish and intent in your spiralled city’s
claimed suburb where I’m hostage to your incursions
your whim to broach my brother’s track
his beauty has left me that used to crinkle air. I tramp through ash
to look for the most wished for

Gig Ryan

* 05.11.1956, Melbourne, Australia
lives in: , Australia

Gig Ryan was born in Melbourne in 1956. She has published six collections of poetry:

The Division of Anger (1981); Manners of an Astronaut (1984); The Last Interior (1986); Excavation (1990); Pure and Applied (1998), which won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry; and Heroic Money (2001). The poems selected here are from her two most recent collections. Ryan is also a song-writer, freelance reviewer, and since 1998, poetry editor of the Melbourne Age.

Ryan’s poetry has a terse, clipped quality, which springs from her concentrated use of irony. Irony is one of the strongest features in Australian writing, and has its roots in historical circumstance. It also works largely through tone and understatement, the unsaid, the implied, the attitude or gesture determining what is meant as much as what is actually said. In Ryan’s portraits and monologues, this traditional ironic stance is intensified through a deliberate awkwardness in the language, and a breaking of its syntactical forms, in order to heighten its gestural and emotional qualities, its tones of menace or disappointment, resentment or vulnerability, self-deception or illusion.

There is a determined resistence in Ryan’s poetry to fluency and ease, as if they papered over the jagged edge of experience, or diluted the power of expression. Her imagery , too, has an intensified, clipped, expressionist quality. Many of the poems in this selection have classical antecedents, and the ghostly ideals of classical form and grace provide an active counterpoint to the rapid, abrupt, compounded or abbreviated presentation characteristic of Ryan’s contemporary landscapes. The use of historical figures also heightens the gestural and tonal intensities of her poems. These intensities also lurk in the vernacular, and like other poets in this group, Ryan mixes colloquial, commercial and poetic forms of language to great effect.

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