Kay Ryan

Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose from Kay Ryan exceeded even my most optimistic expectations. Granted, I did expect to like this but I wasn't sure how much personal insight there would be into her own work versus commentary/interpretation of other's work. Turns out to be a delightful and thoughtful mixture of both.

While one can certainly sketch some form of poetics from these essays this is not a book designed to set forth some kind of theory, at least nothing that would be restrictive show more or exclusive. Any theory here is what readers can, reasonably, extract from Ryan's discussions of her own processes, how she imagines other poets to have been working, and how she interprets both specific poems and complete oeuvres.

What I took away from the book, among many things, was a better understanding of how a poet thinks, both about their own work and that of others. I know that the most lasting lessons I have learned about poetry have not been from courses constructed to teach me about poetry (though those courses were both instructive and enjoyable) but from discussions with poets about poetry. This book is like having several such discussions with an extremely accomplished poet.

While I would certainly recommend this to readers of poetry as well as poets, I think readers who might not think of themselves as liking poetry will also enjoy this collection. there are a few close readings of poems and a lot of discussion of the interface between life (personal and social) and art. Those discussions, while focused on the art of poetry, can easily be applied to art in general and any creative endeavor whatsoever.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

I started off the month with an ambitious project that was part of a poetry store promotion: read a book of poetry a day. Since so many (this one included) are slender, it seemed possible. However, after main-lining Ryan's beautiful poems, I realized this was a terrible idea - they are meant to be savored and pondered, especially in this languid late-summer month. This collection has some stand-outs: the title poem, for one, "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard" which is a thoughtful exploration of show more grief; "Tenderness and Rot" share a border states the first line; "Carrying a Ladder." Published in 2005, it is oddly prescient in its themes of impending doom, things not being what they appear, underlying currents of doubt and dis-ease -- maybe it was the newness of the millennium that accounts for some of that, but regardless, a quarter-century in, and those themes resonate. But there is hope too, especially in the meta sense that art gives us another way of seeing, interpreting, resisting. show less

Ryan's poetry is sly and spare. Could almost call it effervescent. However there's Ryan's version of spare and then, for example, Norma Cole's version of spare, which is to my mind, much richer and more satisfying. Although her poetry looks back to Emily Dickinson, Ryan's knives aren't nearly so sharp. Hers isn't a poetry that I would return to over and over. That said, I added a star (from OK to Liked it)because there are several poems that I admire. For example, "Star Block":
There is no show more such thing
as star block
We do not think of
locking out the light
of other galaxies.
It is light
so rinsed of impurities
(heat, for instance)
that it excites
no antibodies in us.
Yet people are
curiously soluble
in starlight.
Bathed in its
absence of insistence
their substance
loosens willingly,
their bright
designs dissolve.
Not proximity
but distance
burns us with love. show less

The poems in Kay Ryan's astonishing collection "The Best of It: New and Selected Poems" are so crisp and immediate that they seem effortless. It is only upon closer inspection that these little miracles of compression begin to give up their secrets, their engaging surfaces gradually yielding ever more layers of nuance.

Ryan's verse reminds one not so much of conventional narrative poems as of some cunningly made artifacts, like those tiny Russian nesting dolls, or an exquisite enameled box show more that, unsprung, yields an interior vista of startling clarity.

"The Best of It" collects four previous volumes, going back to 1994, and adds 24 new poems. The trajectory of a poet's career in this country, today, does not usually conform to a smooth, triumphalist incline, so it is satisfying to know that Kay Ryan is serving as the U.S. Poet Laureate -- a kind of ambassador for the art.

Taken as a whole, "The Best of It" displays an astounding consistency of tone and quality, with the later work and the new poems perhaps shading a bit toward an elegant midcareer austerity.

One of the many charms here is accessibility: the poems tend toward the bite-size (only a few spill over onto a second page), and their initial effect is of a pleasing briskness, free of the dense opacity and deliberate "difficulty" that makes so much contemporary poetry into the readerly equivalent of a trip to the dentist.

Ryan crafts startling rhymes ("hibiscus / to kiss," and "cracked / exact") and jittery rhythms that often stop short or feature a stress falling on an unexpected syllable, with a sideways hop. They are little exploders of cliche: "A bitter pill doesn't need to be swallowed to work," begins one, while waiting for "The Other Shoe" to drop wouldn't be so bad "if the undropped / didn't congregate / with the undropped . . . acquiring density / and weight."

This is not to say that Ryan's poems are glib or facile; on the contrary, they often address abstractions and proclaim paradoxes with vigor, as in "Forgetting":"Forgetting takes space. Forgotten matters displace / as much anything else as / anything else." For all their colloquial style and down-home wit, Ryan's poems tend to circle deeply philosophical issues."Whatever is done," states one, "leaves a hole in the / possible." Ryan's words mirror her mind, in the sense that both are quick and idiosyncratic, likely to land on the unlikely but inspired thought.

These gifts call to mind some illustrious predecessors, including Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and Robert Frost. Despite the echoes, though, Ryan is so arresting and genuinely original that her book stays in the mind in a way unlike much contemporary poetry, so often impenetrable and self-absorbed. In today's world of exploding self-expression and relentless ephemera, Kay Ryan sticks.

FROM THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER, April 13, 2010. show less