Gig Ryan

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'Rented features' by Gig Ryan

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 06 June 2018

There’s plenty to crack onto, he says, a laundered Valkyrie stomps the DIY:I reconstitute in the shed, my notes can hit the rafters,no-one’s selfing over it, like upstairson their asbestos balustrade,a tick-off at the slightest, though their kidchatters and bounces on the planks.At last summer rises on a blue cactus.Without, it’s crumpled outside of time and dead.I’m not the stonkered stud ... (read more)

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'Know your product' by Gig Ryan

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 06 June 2018

As her to you, unhurried,pair formations addle a skyline,extrovert welcoming traffic, selfless despot on the inner.Even so, his pin-cushioned face glues to the backdrop’s nest of wombats.The city changes from one skyscraper and slateto the creek’s bag-junked ripple, decisive formaldehyde splitting a cloud’s anagram of discontent,replacing slouched velodrome with mouse-topped stove.The introd ... (read more)

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'Simaetha' by Gig Ryan

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 06 June 2018

(Idyll II, Theocritus)   Where are my bay leaves and charms, my bowl with crimson flowerswhile him inexorablehas gone from my bed like a dressDistance: spells of fire wreathe you Shine on this spin or graveAs sight stunned me leaves burnWheel of brass turning from my door Now wave is still and wind is stillMy heart stopped in its foundry As horses run, so we to itStarts love’s knife ... (read more)

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'Grotto' by Gig Ryan

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 06 June 2018

You long for night to push away injunctions and sodalities,sky’s hexagon clouds,as veins lined with velvet straighten the road and undone casketand morning’s birds click through dream. Rest your eyes on the road like an inn,bundled rubbish a corpse on the nature-strip.You take the waters.You embrace a door.Snaked fields welter through moleculesas you burrow a dynamic exit.Day tells you to cir ... (read more)

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'Principle of Insufficient Reason' by Gig Ryan

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 06 June 2018

 I remember you as you were, polished and dismissivenow sawdust and spangles lie on cedar.‘Insufficient funds’ responds to my favoured transactionat the checkout’s dystopia, a green-haired maenad slices the machine.You saw in the eyes the future going away.It carouses in the shadowsa watery silhouette of vengeance. Mouth in ashes, words lie in air.They trot off to a knobbly paradigmwh ... (read more)

'Spring Idylls' by Gig Ryan

April 2018, no. 400 • 27 March 2018

1. ‘My new persona helped me to make money,’ says the streamer,but cruel and petty, unhoped for ideal like a hovercraft shimmersbehind a definition of a chair.You tarnish the boulevardswith your shrapnel castanets and chucked heelsdancing under the exsanguinated sun, but insufficient,burnt coat of meaning wages a lost covenant. You hang out till the last minute then take what’s left.At hom ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Fragments' by Antigone Kefala and 'A House by the River' by Diane Fahey

June-July 2017, no. 392 • 30 May 2017

Antigone Kefala’s Fragments, her fifth book of poems and first since Absence: New and selected poems (1992), is often menaced by the past, like her first collection, The Alien (1973). Here too are some subtly demolishing portraits, as well as buoyant poems such as ‘Metro Cellist’ and the slightly brooding ‘Summer at Derveni’: ‘Afternoon heat / empty of voices / on the foil surface / he ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'The Green Bell' by Paula Keogh

March 2017, no. 389 • 24 February 2017

Since Michael Dransfield’s death at the age of twenty-four in 1973, there have been two books of poems, a Collected Poems (1987), a study of his generation, Parnassus Mad Ward (Livio Dobrez, 1990), as well as Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A sixties biography (Patricia Dobrez, 1999), and John Kinsella’s Michael Dransfield: A retrospective (2002). Unlike other poets who died too young, such as C ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Breezeway: New poems' by John Ashbery

January-February 2016, no. 378 • 21 December 2015

The collage on the cover of Breezeway, John Ashbery's twenty-eighth book of poems, encapsulates his erudite multifariousness. The juxtaposition of Raphael's angel from Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints and de Chirico's The Enigma of Fatality with a nineteenth-century advertisement from Spanish Málaga resembles the pools of moments so typical of Ashbery's mercurial poetry. His poems eschew t ... (read more)

'Rent Time', a new poem by Gig Ryan

December 2014, no. 367 • 01 December 2014

1.Anywhere’s more homelythan this field day to mortality,accumulating severancesthat wrangle distance like before and after’s rosary of rue. ... (read more)