Ryan’s astonishing body of work, now newly and selectively gathered in a single volume, is both tonic and rebuke. It reminds us of the solacing rewards of even the most confrontational poetry, and yet it never stops challenging our ever-ready (or lazy) reading habits.

Ryan’s use of the vernacular is oft praised, though it is not usually a vernacular of idiomatic conversation or casual repartee. Rather, her demotic English has vatic intentions; she refashions the shards of overheard speech and broken syntax into verbal weaponry: nouns as knives, verbs as artillery shells bursting across the page. By recontextualising and decontextualising spoken language, she both satirises and celebrates how we make sense of our lives by talking our way through them.

As exciting (and exacting) as all of this can be, Ryan’s greatest gift might be the ability to alarm at the level of the phrase, to assertively engender discomfort. Yes, this is a received language she’s working with, but she’ll be damned if she’s giving it back to us unmediated or unrevised by a feminist’s street-level world view: ‘You live in the cracked avenues / arguing and warming a kitchen’s generations / Last year wept but now the harrowed road’ (‘Cracked Avenues: Ismene’). Certainly, her practice of invoking mythological figures anachronistically creates obvious opportunities for social commentary; locating Ismene and Antigone (for instance) on the ‘cracked avenues’ of a contemporary city or suburb does nothing to diminish the meaning of the original story, but completely changes our understanding of our immediate lives, adding weight and pathos to what might normally seem bland or pathetic. But what gives these and other poems their power is the syntactical innovation, the way the phrases accost (and seduce) us by being both understandable and strange. Here, in its entirety, is ‘Parting Winter’ from the selection of new poems included in this volume:

Twinned letters, formal as nothing
now is,
the flight napkins sewn with sums,
statistics, possibilities

over the pointed seas, ‘the cost of
ambition’
Skelter your lives

near the steaming University
or paved in wedding snaps, his cut suit,
her belled satin

‘Even just a glimpse of your handwrit-
ing would be enough’
Research papers feather in the mill’s
craw
‘No idle chat,’ ‘less time off’
Orchids and lilies fall from your veil

‘When will I make amends?’

The house snips shut
Now a pool-blue sky turns to frost
and years you never see cast over

So many of these phrases are transparently clear, and even the unattributed dialogue suggests just enough to be understandable. But the poem does not stitch a recognisable whole out of its disparate parts, and many of the lines invite and resist at the same time, usually by means of grammatical conversion or odd word combinations and modifications (‘Research papers feather in the mill’s craw’). Still, poems like this rarely seem confusing or opaque; rather, the newness of her phrasing is usually more than surprising, and often simply beautiful. This is especially true of her most recent work.

Still, what to make of all this? In her famous essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’ (from The Language of Inquiry, 2000), Lyn Hejinian writes, ‘Language itself is never in a state of rest. Its syntax can be as complex as thought. And the experience of using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active – both intellectually and emotionally.’

Ryan’s poems enact Hejinian’s theory (which is simply a reformulation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics) without, again, reneging on whatever responsibility she might feel for her subjects and their significance. But when Hejinian describes a ‘closed text’ as ‘one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it’, and an ‘open text’ as one in which ‘all the elements of the work are maximally excited’, she is more concerned with the nature of argument in poetry, and with how an author’s hierarchical relationship to his or her subject (and its possibilities) limits the reader’s participation. Ryan is conversant in Hejinian’s poetry and thought, but her desire for openness seems less theoretical and more craft-oriented. She has dispensed with the cliché of the fragment as some sort of ultimate (and ultimately honest) embodiment of lyric disclosure and replaced it with an ever-beginning manner of phrasing, a headlong syntax that resists traditional representative poetics, even as it somehow engages content directly and aggressively.

This seeming contradiction is at the heart of her success. Where Ashbery’s social engagement is at best coded and more likely simply understated (though what an elegant and endlessly various form of understatement it is), Ryan’s satire bites, chews, and spits, even if it never quite swallows, never quite closes the deal. In other words, there is little argument in her poetry (a nod to Hejinian), though there is a whole lot of attitude. And since attitude begets tone, we do understand Ryan (where we might not understand Ashbery, in the traditional sense) because we understand her tone. As evidence, here is the opening to ‘The Global Rewards Redemption Centre’:

I heal the ramparts of the deponent
tense
I am being loved and certain
A toast to the surgeon’s art who cut me
from her skin
the night’s software: a drink

Still, clearly Ryan’s beauty is of a different sort from Ashbery’s or Carson’s or Rimbaud’s, or any other obvious influence. In fact, it is difficult to think of another poet who so resists traditional notions of lyric language; these are, for the most part, flat poems that push back against the incantatory seductions of musical phrasing. We will not be lifted into the heavens by Ryan’s lyricism, though there is music here: punk rock’s snarl, Dylan’s raspy croon; but not Chopin’s nocturnes, no distracting beauty. This is the hard beauty, the hard truth, of daily life wrestled into art.

Some of this verbal resistance has to do with Ryan’s reliance on the line break to do the work of punctuation and syntactical organisation, which can create an effect of broken-off speech, a clipped phrasing that hardens on the page. The experience of reading Ryan is not unlike eating words; these are chewy poems, the sort that make our lips move as we read them. They exist in their saying (to paraphrase Auden) as much as in their meaning. This allows the reader a participatory role in the poem’s un-folding, since, by foregrounding the materiality of language, Ryan engages her readers in the process of meaning making; we are aware of how language is and is not operating to create transparent access to content. It is exciting, sometimes difficult, work, and it rewards our efforts.

In the end, the effort results in poems that move us with an honesty that isn’t born of confession. Gig Ryan’s edgy, subversive view of ordinary life renews our capacity to endure and understand our own losses, but not by inviting us to participate in hers. Instead, we find ourselves thrilled by poems that ache even as they scold, and that string together unlikely details (Ryan has a surrealist’s delight for juxtaposition) which then coalesce into beautiful, if oddly dislocating, images. It’s a world made new – sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, always wise.