AustLit

'Gig Ryan (1956–) in my view represents what might become of Australian poetry more so than what has come before, living uneasily in any given cultural, philosophical, or aesthetic tradition. This is work projected towards the future from within modern anxiety. Ryan has lived most of her life in Melbourne, but has also lived in Sydney. She belongs to a minority of living Australian poets published outside of Australia in book form by an active publisher1. The poetic interest of her work lies in its living simultaneously inside and outside the established ways we have of constructing history, especially literary history, along with the poetry’s vivid construction of subjectivity in late modernity using the medium of transhistorical characters from the Western political imaginary, such as Antigone. Hence this work is also unsettled in a monocultural Australian national paradigm, selective with cultural history and legacy outside of the codes of tradition, and incredulous of patriarchy. This introduction to Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems (2011) and broader work will bring contrary critical discourses into a syncretic theory of Ryan’s ambiguous political imaginary using a discussion of anxiety and Antigone, in particular, to introduce and explain shifts in the oeuvre’s consciousness of political subjectivity across six books and roughly thirty years of publication, from The Division of Anger (1980) to Heroic Money (2001), to poems from the present (2015), in general.' (Introduction)