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.
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
...
Spongey beer shells the brain's late noon
Close the window on the tortured cats' feudal sex
The cash register below rings like a phone
The weather inside's cold though outside's blue
...
I throw in my lot with them
showing me the crashed lights they drove into
cold isolate Bohemians
My mind is filled with condiments
...
"I started out with a frayed and urgent lyric
I suppose it was a comparative poverty
then learning appealed to me, though the past scared
...
1.
"Now the teachers bore me
He passes, with his fallen interests
preaching what benefits, softened tyrant
...