Excavation by Gig Ryan

This is a distinctive and unsettling voice, one that doesn’t have time for overly polite concessions to our finer feelings. You either keep pace (and it’s compelling) or stand aside as the spadework gets done. Reading this poetry, we are involved in an unearthing of past events and made witness to the laying bare of personal response. But there’s nothing self-indulgent or hollow about Gig Ryan’s disinterment. The poetry has a sometimes shocking immediacy, a curious mixture of fierceness and vulnerability that conveys feeling with integrity. There is a consistent reliance on vocal patterns as the basis of flexible forms. It reminds me of good investigative journalism – where you would much rather not be shown some of the evidence but, having engaged with the line of questioning, you are irrevocably changed by the event. Here the personal and the political are not poles apart. The singer airs her laments, but the shards of past experience are made to fit together in a new and startling way. Sometimes it is the poet who is the listener: When she remembers every chumpy thingThe baby weather hurts her, the sick sunAt home a dead blind flaps from its jointShe goes on,like it’s the latest reason or excuseand hibernates with pity’s taxied screen around herI could cop it if it workedShe jilts the door, roneo’d with debtsThought protects you from the street’s chattelsThe sky passes like a stick Similarly, ‘Newtown Pastoral’ or ‘Method’ speak of endurance and map out the difficult terrain in which to shepherd souls. This is just one of the poems that deals with others’ stories but simultaneously reveals its effect upon the speaker, or worse, an absence of effect as the witness and the world go about their business: She turns blue in the bathroomMeanwhile the endless parades of Youth and Beautyrecreationally pop in.She recalls him, fagging out on a higher planewhen their blank eyes metThe visited day lurches forward,still negative on the blood test, bereft of hope. This is a world of sex, drugs, and a diminished faith in both the Labor Party and rock and roll. It is profoundly post-1970s in its refusal to sentimentalise the pain of retrieval and in its exposure of the limited relief of escape via the drug (chemicals or love). There are lines that have a power that is hard to overlook: ‘Loneliness chucks out before me like a rug its bleak subtext of despair’, ‘my ears are stuffed with men and the noise they make’, ‘steaming my heart off like a stamp’, ‘I clock on like a silencer’, or ‘Their heads sew a chain of talk that slaps like water on your fish hands’. And yet it is unfair to appropriate them in this way from the focus they provide in context. Sometimes dislocations of syntax result in a loss of meaning or a retreat into unfamiliar terminology – the deficit in the process of making new connections. I don’t feel too short-changed missing the finer dealings in the exchange of coke, smack or heroin as there are other contacts that Gig Ryan makes so well: Surf music seeps from the separated father’s flatA madman in the lane shouts nothingThe walls shudder with the trafficThe Government doesn’t know you from a barI plug my ears with wax to hear the sirensEvery second weekend his kids invent a yardbetween stumps of furniture, a tin shed and a gateThe fridge is tanked with frost. The poem entitled ‘1965’ is a testimonial to the half a million souls who were massacred in the deliberate polarisation of the Indonesian community after dissident military officers were killed and the PKI were persecuted: ‘The false counter plot making the original lie seem true’. The question of who controlled whom is still being speculated about, but Ryan writes in the third person and the woman’s story of her family’s fate in the face of an army’s fear is an absolute indictment of the power of opportunistic central intelligences. At home, Bob Hawke is felled in flight: Our deficit shrinks for a dime, for a francOur resources are wisely invested, minedand just for news, for the party,an occasional priestly shrugat some immoral, that is uneconomic power Throughout, there is an elegiac sequence of poems for a losing, lost and then consigned love, which serves a choric function: Your parties never get deliveredHe skates backwardI retrievedarkness and clearnessthe flaming rosesWhat I said a shamYour door waking the street Eventually, the poet discovers the strength to announce termination by offering a ‘Panegyric’ to the affair. The eulogy, which seems to fill the excavation in the life that has been measured by the poetry, is couched in terms that assert contemporaneity: You didn’t lie, but all the same it’s foiledI fell into the sumand now your ear, your ride, closes to the max. This is timely poetry.

Lyn Jacobs

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