Selected Poems

Gig Ryan was born in 1956 and grew up in Melbourne. She has published six collections of poetry in Australia: The Division of Anger (1981); Manners of an Astronaut (1984); The Last Interior (1986); Excavation (1990); Pure and Applied (1998), which won the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry; and Heroic Money (2001). Ryan is also a freelance reviewer and a songwriter, performing and releasing three albums with Disband (1998) and Driving Past (1999, 2006). She lives in Melbourne, and has been poetry editor of the Melbourne Age since 1998.

'Postmodern poetry discovers its classical voice - Her monologues have a fragmentary quality, as if spoken in a post-Poundian landscape littered with broken statues' - Michael Hulse, Poetry Review. 'Abrupt, pared-back, given to juxtapositions that reshape the urban world her poetry evokes with satirical insight and a dry wicked humour, Ryan's poetry is no easy thing... More the demotic of a dystopia than the vernacular of a republic, Ryan's use of language - its truncation, tautness and drama - cuts equally across the body politic and the scene of poetry. Throughout all of this, her humour, insight and tight music both test and engage the reader. She gives street-learning a classical voice; post-modernism, experience' - Michael Brennan, Poetry International Web.