This is Jacket 14 - July 2001   |   # 14  Contents   |   Homepage   |

This issue of JACKET is a co-production with SALT magazine

Gig Ryan

Two poems

Swoons

She tells of her swoons
many and varied, smitten and occult
and then the wholesome novelist’s parents appear, endearingly
and play their squeamish assessment
Green necklace, the sad viola focuses
Drums accompany the shot of the window

You look the future in the artery
You look love in the foot
enjoying the emptiness
as the no-story play’s women skeet and blip
The meaning of her song, frayed and timely,
slats through the personality’s dull work
in a sorority of fame

How should I capture the blue newspapers
the hanging cords

Mary Wollstonecraft

1

"Now the teachers bore me
He passes, with his fallen interests
preaching what benefits, softened tyrant
He talks over my life
like a plane overhead
a different current
I thought I was fated but I was not
Drenched river"
Stranger to doubt, she splashes
"The fat ex tussling his portfolio beseeched whispers
Garments sink
and failure washed away
He unloves me"

2

"Sister I took from him
but languished governess...

Now I thread hands through sea
on this rocked shore, and flag your business
as food clips and fearful maid scratches
Your child also hecks and ails
Torrents block us and the awning water and silence knifes"
She writes in a feast

         3

"We found more sure
our time spilled together
who could not know this last
I leave you what’s living, loved and better,
though the changed doctors undo"
and arrow freezes

Gig Ryan’s latest book is
Pure and Applied
published by Paper Bark Press
PO Box 59
Brooklyn NSW 2083
Australia
http://www.geko.net.au/~pbp/

Her next book is Heroic Money, Brandl & Schlesinger, Sydney, due May 2001

Gig has songs with her current band DRIVING PAST: Real Estate, CD Chapter Music/Corduroy, 1999 + a new CD due out later in 2001.
She is Poetry Editor of the Age, Melbourne, Australia, and a freelance book reviewer.

J A C K E T # 14   and   S A L T # 13   Contents page
Select other issues of the magazine from the | Jacket catalog | read about Jacket |
Other links: | top | homepage | bookstores | literary links | internet design |
Copyright Notice: Please respect the fact that this material is copyright. It is made available here without charge for personal use only. It may not be stored, displayed, published, reproduced, or used for any other purpose

This issue of Jacket is a co-production with SALT magazine,
an international journal of poetry and poetics, edited by John Kinsella
PO Box 937, Great Wilbraham, Cambridge PDO, CB1 5JX United Kingdom ISSN 1324-7131

This material is copyright © Gig Ryan
and Jacket magazine and SALT magazine 2001
The URL address of this page is
http://jacketmagazine.com/14/ryan-gig.html