Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan reviews 'Home by Dark' by Pam Brown

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 27 June 2013

Home by Dark is Pam Brown’s seventeenth book. She has also published ten chapbooks, including two collaborations. Brown’s poems are mostly elliptical, pithy, hewn into slight lines that imply or jest. Each poem manoeuvres and collects the everyday. It is an aesthetic of accumulation, a bricolage that navigates a precarious engagement with the world. Dailiness transmits a poetics of thought in ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Lime Green Chair' by Chris Andrews

March 2013, no. 349 • 07 March 2013

Lime Green Chair, which is Chris Andrews’s second book, won in manuscript form the Anthony Hecht 2011 Poetry Prize. Andrews is also a prize-winning translator from the Spanish of Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, and others. Lime Green Chair translates and transforms everyday moments into auguries of time disappearing. Each of these mostly 21-line poems is finely patterned with unexpected rhyme and ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Selected Poems 1975–2010' and 'Four Poems' by Ken Bolton

October 2012, no. 345 • 25 September 2012

Ken Bolton has published twenty books of poetry in the past thirty-five years, including a verse novel, The Circus (2010), and an earlier Selected Poems (1992), as well as seven often hilarious poetic collaborations with John Jenkins. An art critic, Bolton edited the seminal magazines Magic Sam and Otis Rush; and he has been a publisher with Sea Cruise and Little Esther Books. Bolton’s poems amu ... (read more)

'Savonarola', a new poem by Gig Ryan

December 2011–January 2012, no. 337 • 24 November 2011

Savonarola Gig Ryan ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Surface to Air' by Jaya Savige

November 2011, no. 336 • 21 October 2011

Jaya Savige’s first book, latecomers (2005), was an impressive début and won the New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry in 2006. Surface to Air is a more varied, equally impressive, volume. Savige meditates on the poet Tasso’s oak tree (inspired by Peter Porter’s ‘Tasso’s Oak’), a survivor of Hiroshima, the Big Brother television show, and, as this book’s epigraph by W.S. ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Ashes in the Air' by Ali Alizadeh

April 2011, no. 330 • 26 March 2011

Poet and novelist Ali Alizadeh’s third book of poetry, Ashes in the Air, reclaims some themes from his earlier poetry collection, Eyes in Times of War (2006). Autobiographical sequences once again interweave with accounts of recent wars and oppression. Alizadeh also explores some conflicting oppositions: neutrality versus partisanship, faith versus scepticism, individualism versus community. Ali ... (read more)