52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
59. The best of it: new and selected poems.
Ryan is the former Poet Laureate of the United States, and this book anthologizes the best of her small, sure, surprising poems from the past decade. She writes poems about leftovers, lacunae, empty spaces. Lost places. Limits—limited quantities, limited measurements, limited abilities—are all over these poems, as if she’s trying to describe what nothingness looks like, feels like. For instance:
Silence
Silence is not snow.
It cannot grow
deeper. A thousand years
of it are thinner
than paper. So
we must have it
all wrong
when we feel trapped
like mastodons.
You can see that the concern with limits is reflected in her spare style, her rationed syllables. Everything is stripped down to its essence, resulting in the surprising punch of the final lines, over and over, in each poem. Her sly humor comes out in this way, here and there, especially in the interior rhymes. Sometimes she approaches cleverness, but more often she tips over into the profound revelation, giving insight into something the reader has never spoken but always known. The terseness and sharp focus of her poems gives her voice authority: the poems come off like proverbs, or koans. This is enhanced by her refusal to use the first person, except in the rarest of instances.
These are wildly accessible and fantastic poems, so consistently revealing that they approach the spiritual. Her unique dedication to her form, and the quality and development of her themes, truly earn her work the designation: masterful.
