BEST OF IT, ERRATIC FACTS, FLAMINGO WATCHING - KAY RYAN

BEST OF IT, ERRATIC FACTS, FLAMINGO WATCHING - KAY RYAN Recently, I’ve had a compulsion to sort of cleanse the palate from these more heavy duty non-fiction slogs (almost all of which are pretty depressing) I find myself in the middle of. In a sort of happy accident, I came across Ryan’s poetry exactly when I was in the market for such writing. I’ve now gone a bit crazy and worked my way through most of her published oeuvre. Actually, the extent to which I’ve read through her work is a bit unclear. BEST OF IT, is, as you might guess from the title, a best of/greatest hits compilation that includes the text of several other chapbooks (including ELEPHANT ROCKS, which I’ve previously reviewed) from across her career. I’m not sure if BEST OF IT contains the full texts of these books, or if it is edited down. Either way, I’ve been delightfully ensconced in her poetry for a week or so. The poems are all very short, just a page or so, and, the best of them, snap like a whip at the end. It’s very easy to digest them in short bursts when you need a break from something else. These are poems with lots of surface charm; unlike a lot of poetry by living poets, Ryan is not going to make you sweat and ponder and reread to get any pleasure out of the poems. Quite the opposite, her poems offer tons of surface charm and the best ones touch something deep. A lot of this readability comes from her use of rhyme and rhythm. Instead of using end rhymes or an established meter, the poems twist and congeal around internal rhymes and the rhythms will morph and change across a given poem. Ex:

                  ...to rhyme

Anything with hibiscus

is interdicted anytime

children or anyone weakened 

by sickness is expected

. This lead to a strange phenomena whereby the order in which I read the poems seemed to really affect my judgement of them. More specifically, it would read a few poems, think they were okay, then have a dozen or so hit hard and excite me before I’d put the book down and save the rest for later. I think this is because it takes a few poems for me to attune to Ryan’s craft and structures. I semi-proved this by just picking the book up at random and running into the same issue, where the first few poems don’t resonate as much. Irregardless, I very much enjoyed these collections. She spends a lot of time dissecting idioms and popular phrases as well as inquires into silence and disappointments, both great themes for poetry. I’ve got several pages of quotes I pulled from the poems. Examples: “Tenderness and rot/share a border” “[failure is] a dank/but less ephemeral/efflorescence than success/is in general” “action creates/a taste/for itself” and on and on. Actually, pulling the lines out of the poems does a disservice since many of them are rhyming off and answering other lines. Either way, the only complainant that I have is that there is very little Kay Ryan left for me to read. I might take a break to savor the final 3 chapbooks that exist. 2011 recombinant rhymes.