Two Poems by Gig Ryan [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Gig Ryan is probably best known for her much anthologised poem “If I Had a Gun,” which has acquired the status of a feminist anthem, as noted by the eminent Australian critic and publisher Ivor Indyk. Since its publication in her debut collection The Division of Anger (1980), Ryan has gone on to fashion one of the most impressive oeuvres in all of Australian poetry. Ryan’s poetry is marked by her ability to capture the Australian vernacular, with its sharp, fragmentary, vociferate (almost ejaculatory) cadence. She often deploys these disjointed inflections as vehicles to interchange perspectives midthought, a technique that emphasizes her sophisticated use of irony. But her poetry is also one of understatement—characterized by the implied, the insinuated or even the unsaid. It is this tension in Ryan's poetry between the "frank and evasive" that makes her a favorite of mine.

 

“Not Like a Wife” is a good example of Ryan’s clipped, almost curt, quality. It is in turns ironic, comic, vulnerable, and uses acutely evocative and original imagery—incredibly specific but achingly relatable. We immediately know what it's like to be unable to “eat spaghetti effectively”, and our minds wander on after the poem's ending, considering just what this seemingly innocuous inability might be emblematic of in our own lives.

 

Not Like a Wife 

He questions her, his face soft with lovely money.
Be my mistress. He's French, polite as corruption.
Yes. Her clothes are dirty. Love has made me poor.
She leans against the flimsy cupboard, wrapping her face up
in her hands. I loved a rich man
once, but I was never blonde, and suntans you know,
so bland. I never looked American enough
on the beach.

I'll take you to Bangkok he says, the jewellery.
I can't wear it. The nightclubs. Yes.
You could look like a million dollars you know,
touching her shirt collar, if you had it.
I can't cook. His dark eyes soft and persistent
as flesh, wise with money he talks.
You like it here yes, you find character in poverty?
This arms snatch the whole creaking house up.
He's laughing at the plaster. You're so frank and evasive.
It's alright, really, tense as a movie,
watching carlights flash above the bed.
He loved me once. You're new, aren't you.

The sink's blocked in Darlinghurst.
I never could eat spaghetti effectively,
too unmarried or something.

 

“Profile” doesn’t need much of an introduction—so instead I will point you in the direction of Ryan’s New and Selected, which gives the poet’s career profile its proper due. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

 

Profile

"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
then the Orpheus poems
a sort of self-commentary
You’ll see in my second book how I’ve
tackled national themes
My spoken word CD
was the people’s voice for a while
Later I was avant-garde
You can read the accompanying text’s
explication of process

And now, to seem
Priests gather at the table
and swim in the pages of my future
to a world I’ve barely crept on
The greats I keep at a distance,
fervid for those overlooked by history
to hope perhaps someone attends my book
They crown me with reward”

 

Comments

[David Lehman]

Thank you for this excellent inbntroduction to Gig Ryan's work.

[Kat Georges]

Thanks for making me aware of “Not Like a Wife”— exquisite basher of a poem. Gig Ryan is my new superhero poet!