Gig Ryan

Achilleus to Odysseus

langue: anglais

traductions: allemand (Achilleus zu Odysseus)

Achilleus to Odysseus

Vanished day,
to strive for fame, to glitter in a marble pool
but lose the task
You sit among the virtuous weeding out life
Personalities sulk
the talking breakfast, the blacked-out calendar
They whirl and fit

I wish I lived with silence
black waves plucking the shore away from things
Traffic stripes night and trains kick
the black dissolving world
and stove-white pages
Drunken introverts graft home
the active and idle
Velvet bodies forming on the beach
Footsteps break the slab of flats
I walk into a house of death

Gig Ryan

Foto © gezett.de

* 05.11.1956, Melbourne, Australie
Réside à: , Australie

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.

Foto © gezett.de

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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