There is a consistent reliance on vocal patterns as the basis of flexible forms. It reminds me of good investigative journalism – where you would much rather not be shown some of the evidence but, having engaged with the line of questioning, you are irrevocably changed by the event. Here the personal and the political are not poles apart. The singer airs her laments, but the shards of past experience are made to fit together in a new and startling way. Sometimes it is the poet who is the listener:

When she remembers every chumpy thing
The baby weather hurts her, the sick sun
At home a dead blind flaps from its joint
She goes on,
like it’s the latest reason or excuse
and hibernates with pity’s taxied screen around her
I could cop it if it worked
She jilts the door, roneo’d with debts
Thought protects you from the street’s chattels
The sky passes like a stick

Similarly, ‘Newtown Pastoral’ or ‘Method’ speak of endurance and map out the difficult terrain in which to shepherd souls. This is just one of the poems that deals with others’ stories but simultaneously reveals its effect upon the speaker, or worse, an absence of effect as the witness and the world go about their business:

She turns blue in the bathroom
Meanwhile the endless parades of Youth and Beauty
recreationally pop in.
She recalls him, fagging out on a higher plane
when their blank eyes met

The visited day lurches forward,
still negative on the blood test, bereft of hope.

This is a world of sex, drugs, and a diminished faith in both the Labor Party and rock and roll. It is profoundly post-1970s in its refusal to sentimentalise the pain of retrieval and in its exposure of the limited relief of escape via the drug (chemicals or love). There are lines that have a power that is hard to overlook: ‘Loneliness chucks out before me like a rug its bleak subtext of despair’, ‘my ears are stuffed with men and the noise they make’, ‘steaming my heart off like a stamp’, ‘I clock on like a silencer’, or ‘Their heads sew a chain of talk that slaps like water on your fish hands’. And yet it is unfair to appropriate them in this way from the focus they provide in context. Sometimes dislocations of syntax result in a loss of meaning or a retreat into unfamiliar terminology – the deficit in the process of making new connections. I don’t feel too short-changed missing the finer dealings in the exchange of coke, smack or heroin as there are other contacts that Gig Ryan makes so well:

Surf music seeps from the separated father’s flat
A madman in the lane shouts nothing
The walls shudder with the traffic
The Government doesn’t know you from a bar
I plug my ears with wax to hear the sirens
Every second weekend his kids invent a yard
between stumps of furniture, a tin shed and a gate
The fridge is tanked with frost.

The poem entitled ‘1965’ is a testimonial to the half a million souls who were massacred in the deliberate polarisation of the Indonesian community after dissident military officers were killed and the PKI were persecuted: ‘The false counter plot making the original lie seem true’. The question of who controlled whom is still being speculated about, but Ryan writes in the third person and the woman’s story of her family’s fate in the face of an army’s fear is an absolute indictment of the power of opportunistic central intelligences.

At home, Bob Hawke is felled in flight:

Our deficit shrinks for a dime, for a franc
Our resources are wisely invested, mined
and just for news, for the party,
an occasional priestly shrug
at some immoral, that is uneconomic power

Throughout, there is an elegiac sequence of poems for a losing, lost and then consigned love, which serves a choric function:

Your parties never get delivered
He skates backward
I retrieve
darkness and clearness
the flaming roses
What I said a sham
Your door waking the street

Eventually, the poet discovers the strength to announce termination by offering a ‘Panegyric’ to the affair. The eulogy, which seems to fill the excavation in the life that has been measured by the poetry, is couched in terms that assert contemporaneity:

You didn’t lie, but all the same it’s foiled
I fell into the sum
and now your ear, your ride, closes to the max.

This is timely poetry.