POETRY IN REVIEW

1 7 6 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W L A N G D O N H A M M E R There is no mistaking a Kay Ryan poem. Typically less than a page long, with one short line folded into the next like origami in verse, each poem presents a curious conceit, a thought experiment that combines observation and reflection so thoroughly it is hard to tell whether the subject is abstract or concrete, metaphysical or material . But those alternatives miss the point. Ryan’s true subject is the language she uses, and everyone uses. Her perspective is oddangled , fanciful, and eccentric. Yet she writes about common experiences and, in particular, verbal commonplaces, the store of proverb and cliché by which people daily make sense of the world. Whatever else they are about (and she can write about almost anything: a sentence by Fernando Pessoa, hide-and-seek, Ming Dynasty ceramics, a half a loaf of bread), her poems are about our ways of saying things, and what these say about us. A chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and the U.S. Poet Laureate for 2008–10, Ryan is not exactly an obscure figure in American poetry. But at least until recently, she has led a very private life. She seldom reviews new books, writes blurbs, or judges T h e B e s t o f I t : N e w a n d S e l e c t e d P o e m s , by Kay Ryan (Grove Press, 270 pp., $24.00) 1 7 7 R contests. Rather than lead poetry writing workshops in an MFA program, she has long taught English part time at the College of Marin, a community college in northern California, where she lived with her partner, Carol Adair, to whom her books are dedicated , until Adair’s death last year. These facts come from Wikipedia , rather than Ryan’s poetry, in which there is next to no autobiographical information to be found. It is not that the poems are veiled and a mysterious poet lurks somewhere behind them. Rather, her poems seem to say that her life, insofar as it matters to her readers, is more or less like theirs – even, or especially, what is most peculiar and private about it. Her new collection, The Best of It, contains poems from the four books she has published since 1994 (her first two books didn’t make the cut) and adds 24 that are published for the first time. The diminutive scale and consistent form of her work are emphasized by this showcasing. Of the 230 printed here, only 21 poems go on to a secondpage,nonereachesathird,andjust26arebrokenintostanzas. In short, the book presents more than 200 poems that look pretty much the same: with a single word or brief phrase for a title, set flush left, compressed in roughly sonnet-sized blocks, with few lines longer than four beats and many as short as two or three words. Brevity, density, precision – the physical dimensions of Ryan’s poems communicate a determined miniaturism. In an era in American poetry in which other poets are intent on showing how many different kinds of poems they can write, and some take the book (or the series of books) as a unit of composition, this is a striking program. We might expect a miniaturist like Ryan to have been influenced by Imagism or its hipper successor Objectivism. But her poetry has little to do with the presentational aesthetic of Ezra Pound (who told would-be Imagists to ‘‘use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation’’) and not much more with the epigrammatic poetry that takes its cue from William Carlos Williams. ‘‘No ideas but in things’’: Ryan might agree with Williams , but she would probably insist that the opposite – ‘‘No things but in ideas’’ – is also true, or truer. Rather than Pound or Williams, Ryan’s a≈nities are with the modernist moralists Robert Frost and Marianne Moore. Ryan has called Frost ‘‘our great twentiethcentury poet, astonishingly, breathtakingly skilled – and magical, at his best.’’ Frost is audible...