Selected Poems

by Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan's edgy, excoriating poetry takes the pulse of urban Australia, but her territory is as much the human rat-race and the hell of contemporary life as the particular lives she seizes upon with icy, ironic precision. Her range of reference brings together heroes, heroines and put-upon mortals of both ancient and modern slaves and moneygrabbers, pretenders and worshippers of ephemera and effluvia, for whom 'I continue my existence as a negative role-model / bathing in the blood of others / sitting in a cone of noise.'

176 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2012

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine collection of Aussie poet Ryan's stuff, encompassing her several-decades career. Ryan is hard to pin down, which is why she'd one of many fascinating contemporary poets like Bernard, Wiese, or Volkman. If forced at banana-point to characterize her poems, I'd say it's kind of urbany and wickedy, more Mayakovsky than May Sarton, but with the piety for the lack of the self and the quest for it that both twinkle with.