by Kay Ryan
Grove Press 2010
Reviewed by David Gruber

“the greenest saddest strongest / kind of hope”

At the beginning of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, Faust, exhausted from his tormented encounter with Gretchen, finds renewal in contemplating the “changing-unchanged arch” (Stuart Atkins’s translation) of a rainbow formed by a mountain waterfall.  Reading Kay Ryan’s volume of new and selected poems, The Best of It, offers us a similar experience of change that remains grounded in concrete and specific concerns, both in terms of Ryan’s themes and in the long view that we get of her stylistic evolution over the last sixteen years. 

Ryan’s poems as represented in this volume are almost all short, and in many cases presented in a single, highly focused stanza.  The natural world, animals and abstractions are her central subjects; we get few poems here about people in anything other than a general sense.  The whole body of Ryan’s work reflects an impulse towards aphorism, even in the occasional case where the intention towards meaning of the aphoristic form is subverted by the poet, which may be why her poems are able to pull us away from the frenetic worlds of work, media and society.  These poems offer us the opportunity to contemplate the image or thought at their heart without distraction, with the result that, in the best of the poems collected here, we are able to see afresh the fragment of the world that Ryan focuses on and to consider the ways in which the world, in the form of these fragments, shapes us.  Take, for example, the poem “Expectations,” selected from The Niagara River:

We expect rain
to animate this
creek: these rocks
to harbor gurgles,
these pebbles to
creep downstream
a little, those leaves
to circle in the
eddy, the stains
and gloss of wet.
The bed is ready
but no rain yet.

This poem focuses our attention onto not only the creekbed and the creek’s absence, but also onto the assumptions about the natural world that our minds operate within without questioning.  After all, if the creek is a dry bed, is it still a creek?  What makes it such except our ability to image the soil changed by its encounter with water, whether the water is present at this moment or not?  Ryan works on and against our expectations and assumptions about the world throughout this book, exploring the tension between changing and unchanged.  Much of the time her handling of this tension is masterful, and productive of a pathos that leaves us, like Faust, refreshed.  In a book of over 260 pages, the majority of the poems are satisfying in this way, and choosing examples is almost merely a matter of opening the book. 

However, there is a surprisingly substantial minority of poems here that are not satisfying, and which strike me as a little too clever, such as a new poem “Bitter Pill”:

A bitter pill
doesn’t need
to be swallowed
to work.  Just
reading your name
on the bottle
does the trick.
As though there
were some anti-
placebo effect.
As though the
self were eager
to be wrecked.

This poem, and others like it, feel too light for the emotional weight that Ryan asks them to carry in their conclusions.  The title and the phrase “anti-placebo effect” gesture towards a feeling or an observation that deserves to be expressed with more than a cliché or a cliché turned on its head.  Poems like this suggest a desire to score points with the reader by producing wry laughter at the connection between title and poem, but unlike “Expectations,” “Bitter Pill” doesn’t give us enough reason to be “wrecked” by the poem’s final lines.  The aphoristic impulse that runs through all of her poetry in this instance gets stuck in the realm of observational humor, and also subverts the power of her more genuinely humorous poems.

A more consistent pleasure in this book is in seeing the evolution of Ryan’s “changing-unchanged” poetic style.  The selected poems in this book are drawn from four previous collections stretching back to 1994, and while the earliest and latest poems share much in the way of poetic effect, primarily enjambment used to shift meaning from line to line, and a gentle scheme of occasional rhyme, the language of Ryan’s poetry has transformed from the supple and rich long(er) lines of Flamingo Watching (as in these from “A Certain Kind of Eden”: 

A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope”)

to the two- or three-word lines of Niagara River and the new poems.  Reading through this collection, we see the longer lines of the earlier poems start to give ground, and eventually recede entirely, in the face of the narrow lines of Ryan’s most recent work.  At times we can see this even in a single poem, where short lines give way to long or vice versa, particularly in selections from 1996’s Elephant Rocks.

And yet, despite these changes, there is an unchanged quality to Ryan’s language.  All of her poems exhibit a confidence in word choice and a spare, necessary quality, in which each word develops the themes and ideas of the poem.  Ryan has no use for tangent or wordplay for the sake of tangent or wordplay alone, and even the genuinely funny poems (and even those which feel to me too clever)  present themselves as important, which underscores the value of humor in the work of poetry. 

This collection offers an interesting overview of Ryan’s career, and the effect of the poetry, taken individually or in short bursts, is to help us look at the world as if it were new.  I’m not sure, however, that I enjoyed her work as much as I might if there had been less of it – at times I found the sheer number of poems presented in this collection to be overwhelming, and such a presentation grates against the contemplative mood that the individual poems seem to call for.  Nevertheless, there is a great beauty in almost all of Ryan’s work, and The Best of It would make a valuable addition to the collection where Ryan is yet unrepresented.

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