Erratic Facts

September 21, 2015
Ryan, a MacArthur Fellow and former Poet Laureate, follows her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Best of It with a ninth collection of her signature short, brilliant poems. Drawing upon epigraphs from such varied sources as W.G. Sebald, NPR, and the New York Times science section, Ryan teases out thoughts with shifting rhyme schemes as her poems display their alluring logic and peculiar practicality. In Ryan’s world, a water wheel’s buckets are “all the ornaments/ of torque,” while an anticipated conversation becomes something “sizzling inside a face,” and a crow’s stride “criss crosses/ as though/ each step/ checked the/ last.” But her quirky lightness is deceptive; each instance Ryan captures and examines reveals the darkness beneath its charming veneer. Her poem “Almost” likens the movements of thought to a slaughterhouse: “The mind/ likes the squeeze/ of chutes and channels./ It will go up the ramp/ with cattle, pleased—/ almost to the last minute.” In another piece, she toys with obsessively returning to the same thought that “can’t/ deepen and yet/ you think it again:/ you have lost/ count. A larger/ amount is/ no longer a/ larger amount.” With Ryan, readers make new discoveries and then discover what’s been lost: “There are hills/ you long to touch,/ velvet to the eyes.// So much is soft/ the wrong size.”

August 1, 2015

Erratics, as we are informed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ryan (for 2011's The Best of It), are those oddly situated boulders carried far from their origins by glaciers. The term might also apply to the poet's own deftly composed lyrics, eccentric machineries of metaphysical speculation that attempt to trigger "an/ emergency of the/ too realized we/ realize." Each offers a threshold, an invitation to consider a variety of contradictions--a ship in a bottle, musical chairs, a crow's crisscross gait--in light of their possibilities, either figuratively or in reality. Ryan's signature concision and brevity matches form to function, providing shelter from "the assault/ of abundance" while simultaneously creating expansive space for reflection. The poem "Eggs" is a prime example: "We turn out/ as tippy as/ eggs. Legs/ are an illusion./ We are held/ as in a carton/ if someone/ loves us./ It's a pity/ only loss/ proves this." VERDICT Much more than clever observations or glancing "earmarks/ of the actual," Ryan's deceptively simple poems open inviting pinhole entrances for the light of the mind. [See Prepub Alert, 6/14/15.]--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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October 1, 2015
It is revitalizing to read Ryan's succinct poemsword columns build like cairns on the otherwise blank and silent wilderness of the pageand experience the precisely walloping impact of her uncommon observations, philosophical realizations, and significant wit. Read a poem once and take in its crisp rhythms, subtle rhymes, and arresting images. Read it again and detect its hide-and-seek metaphors and meanings. A two-term U.S. poet laureate, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a MacArthur fellow, Ryan follows her new and selected collection, The Best of It (2010), with a pithy and substantial eighth book. Nature is an inspiration; tribute is paid to Thelonious Monk, whose spare poetic music correlates so gracefully with her concise lyricism, while out of the tactilean arrowhead sharpened with a rock, a hammer striking a bottle containing a shipspark sharp, startling insights. Physical marvels, from fizz to the trajectory of a baseball in flight and the passage of a ship across the sea, fascinate Ryan, whose quantum poems pose resonant questions of physics and metaphysics, of attentiveness and caring on scales intimate and universal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)