Ryan, Gig (Elizabeth)
RYAN, Gig (Elizabeth)
Nationality: Australian and British. Born: Leicester, England, 5 November 1956. Education: LaTrobe University, Melbourne, 1974; Sydney University, 1983–87; University of Melbourne, 1991–93, degree in Latin and Ancient Greek 1993. Career: Also works as songwriter and musician. Awards: Australia Council Literature Board Writers grant, 1979, 1982, 1988, 1992; co-winner, Anne Elder award, 1982; C.J. Dennis Victorian Premiers award for poetry, 1999. Address: 1189 Burke Road, Kew, Melbourne 3101, Australia.
Publications
Poetry
The Division of Anger. Sydney, Transit Press, 1981.
Manners of an Astronaut. Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1984.
The Last Interior. Melbourne, Scripsi, 1986.
Excavation. Sydney, Picador, 1990.
Pure and Applied. N.p., PaperBark Press, 1998.
Recordings: Six Goodbyes, Big Home Productions, 1988; Real Estate, Chapter Music, 1999.
* * *The publication of Gig Ryan's The Division of Anger in 1980 announced, with a certain frisson among audiences at readings in Sydney and Melbourne, the presence of a new enfant terrible. Ryan's harsh delivery, each phrase chopped down at the end, emphasized her preoccupation with people moving among drugs, disgust, venality, and a jeering despair.
Backed by the resolutely urban poet John Tranter, the publisher and editor of Transit Poetry, Ryan has continued to carry out his agenda for a realism under fluorescent light that favors the explicit argot of urban disillusionment. The realism is trenchant and unrelenting enough at times to get in the way of an appreciation of Ryan's brilliant ways of unsettling the reader, her constantly resourceful subjective notation, her montage technique, her deliberate banality and bad taste and pasted-on similes, her occasional sentimentality, and, finally, her ability to be very funny. The following is from "Getting it":
He kisses, his pale guilt blowing—and in "In the lovely crowd"—
like a flower. You're luxurious, unsure.
Your eyes opening like telescopes
on a clean brain.
You're so silly in the kitchen, like a new
appliance...
Will you buy me a dark salmon citroen
please, with all your brilliant money,
how it smells like a bank-clerk.
The same qualities are seen in "Dying for it"—
He copes with the table.
I would kill a thousand crocodiles for you.
His sincerity clacking like chain-mail,
death-hot, and your dead throat moves
one dream down
You want a man to apologise to,
He avoids the place now like Queensland,
as his radical politics fatten...
Manners of an Astronaut is described in the blurb as a "deeply coherent 'discontinuous narrative,'" though the narrative probably matters little to Ryan's fans, who enjoy the authentic mix in each poem. There is no obvious buildup of characters and situations among the monologues. The Last Interior continues the vein of anger and disgust, with the incitement of "bad-behaviour" opening lines, as in "Four":
Now that my obsession's had it, I'm bored.
You waver before me like bad television.
and
Getting drunk, I insult everybody.
and
They shoot up in the kitchen.
and
We lay on the floor, getting speed
and your face like an airport
and
In love again like plaster...
Those who had been waiting for development in Ryan's art probably felt that the moment had come when Excavation was published. Here are poems about the media, politics ("The mind's shacks are stranded and overpopulated, South Africa," "On first looking into Fairfax's Herald"), and social problems ("Living in a vacant lot"). Sharp-edged phrases still overlap everywhere, and epigrams are up and non sequiturs down. This is clearly a controlled and varied menu and, even when cynically dismissive, near enough to good-humored, as in "Gone too":
He says I'm a liar
I shelve death back into my head
The sick cells, the murder
I figured it was a goer,
new, and all
Why are you so weak?
I like him like air.
He tells me to fuck off: what's new?
A great girl friend vacuums and builds a temple
Not me
I turn the heart into a quiver,
shoot and forget.
No one, even those such as Alan Wearne and John Forbes among the near contemporaries who support her most strongly, writes like Ryan. Her hand is immediately recognizable within a few lines. She is one of the ablest younger "established" poets in Australia, though the question stands as to a perceived sameness in her work. With her 1998 book Pure and Applied, Ryan's characteristic tone has become honed to biting precision, particularly in the political and socially acerbic poems, while her portrait poems and dramatic monologues bring to fierce life her passionate concerns, and her highly crafted knowledge of the range of poetic and song patterns coheres them into a unified and vivid personal expression.
—Judith Rodriguez