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Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan has published six books of poetry and her New and Selected Poems was published in 2011. She was Poetry Editor of The Age from 1998 to 2016. Her next book of poetry will be released in late 2022. (Photograph by Mia Schoen)

 

Gig Ryan reviews ‘The Golden Bird: New and selected poems’ by Robert Adamson

November 2008, no. 306 01 November 2008
From his first book Canticles on the Skin (1970) to his twelfth, The Goldfinches of Baghdad (2006), Robert Adamson’s poetry has undergone many transformations, but The Golden Bird, his new and rather large Selected Poems, modifies or disguises those changes by arranging the poems thematically, not chronologically, except for the last section, which contains new poems. Many of Adamson’s early t ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'The Bee Hut' by Dorothy Porter

October 2009, no. 315 01 October 2009
The Bee Hut, Dorothy Porter’s fifteenth book, is a collection of poems written between 2004 and her death in December 2009. Many poems address mortality: ‘nothing lasts / not Forster. not Cavafy’s eloquent doomed mediocrities. not you.’ Another important motif is travel and how it affects the traveller. There are two almost contrary themes in the travel poems: the recurring image of the ar ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews ‘a raiders guide’ by Michael Farrell

April 2009, no. 310 01 April 2009
Michael Farrell’s a raiders guide has no page numbers and no index, indicating that it is to be read as one. Farrell’s work, like that of the Language poets, draws attention to language itself rather than emphasising content or emotion: that is, language is at least temporarily estranged from meaning. Yet, like most attempted definitions, the same could be said of most poetry. Farrell’s work ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Dark Bright Doors' by Jill Jones

June 2010, issue no. 322 01 June 2010
In Dark Bright Doors, her tenth book, Jill Jones again explores a sense of contradiction. Perhaps in tune with this theme, Jones’s work here also shows two distinct types of poems, one that is part-hallucinatory, invoking the elements ‘air’, ‘water’ and an encompassing natural world of breath, rain, sky, sun, wings. In these poems, Jones attempts to describe the indescribable, to remark ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Bestseller' by M.T.C Cronin

October 2001, no. 235 01 October 2001
In the August 2001 issue of Meanjin, M.T.C. Cronin writes of poetry: ‘The poems are not as useful as ribs but like them do protect life and when removed from the body grow certain murmurings of the mind.’ No matter how chaotic or runic her prose pronouncements, Cronin’s poems are quirky and original at best, diffuse and repetitive at worst. Cronin continues to ‘just go on your nerve’, as ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Topsy-Turvy' by Charles Bernstein

March 2022, no. 440 21 February 2022
Charles Bernstein, born in 1950, is a prolific poet and theorist of Language poetry, which arose in the 1970s in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War movement (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it). As with similar movements in many countries, including Australia, this now semi-institutionalised poetry began as radical revolt against an established verse culture that preferred its poetry to ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'A Bud' by Claire Gaskin and 'Cube Root of Book' by Paul Magee

March 2007, no. 289 01 March 2007
Paul Magee’s first book, Cube Root of Book, digs through the roots of life. He revisits past incidents, examining what draws him to poetry. Magee’s accurate translations from Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Catullus, interspersed throughout, heighten his subject matter but contrast with his own less proven work. Yet these translations draw attention to his fragmented, deracinated modern life, apparen ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Fire Season' by Kate Middleton

July-August 2009, no. 313 01 July 2009
Kate Middleton’s accomplished first book, Fire Season, begins with ‘Autobiography’, where the child kicks against the perceived constraints and ambiguities of her sex: she could ‘make a half-decent boy’ only if the books she read were ‘full enough of war / or gunrunners, or treasure, or spies, or spoils / of piracy. No, I didn’t know how to hold a hammer.’ Middleton constructs a ve ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'Bestseller' by M.T.C. Cronin

October 2001, no. 235 01 October 2001
In the August 2001 issue of Meanjin, M.T.C. Cronin writes of poetry: ‘The poems are not as useful as ribs but like them do protect life and when removed from the body grow certain murmurings of the mind.’ No matter how chaotic or runic her prose pronouncements, Cronin’s poems are quirky and original at best, diffuse and repetitive at worst. Cronin continues to ‘just go on your nerve’, as ... (read more)

Gig Ryan reviews 'I Don’t Know How That Happened' by Oliver Driscoll, 'nothing to declare' by Mags Webster, and 'The dancer in your hands ' by Jo Pollitt

April 2021, no. 430 23 March 2021
I Don’t Know How That Happened by Oliver Driscoll Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 74 pp Oliver Driscoll’s note on his first book I Don’t Know How That Happened praises the inclusive flatness of David Hockney’s still life paintings, and it is to this inclusiveness that his poems and prose pieces aspire. Droll reported speech creates a comic atmosphere but also moves into Kafkaesque alie ... (read more)
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