Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan's poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan's fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books. Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of Dana Gioia, "take the shape of an idea clarifying itself." "A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know.... Poetry as statement and aphorism is rarely heartbreaking, but reading these poems I find myself continually ambushed by a fundamental sorrow, one that hides behind a surface that interweaves sound and sense in immaculately interesting ways." — Jane Hirshfield, Common Boundary; "The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness." — Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle.
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Say Uncle
Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan's poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan's fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books. Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of Dana Gioia, "take the shape of an idea clarifying itself." "A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know.... Poetry as statement and aphorism is rarely heartbreaking, but reading these poems I find myself continually ambushed by a fundamental sorrow, one that hides behind a surface that interweaves sound and sense in immaculately interesting ways." — Jane Hirshfield, Common Boundary; "The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness." — Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle.
Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan's poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan's fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books. Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of Dana Gioia, "take the shape of an idea clarifying itself." "A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know.... Poetry as statement and aphorism is rarely heartbreaking, but reading these poems I find myself continually ambushed by a fundamental sorrow, one that hides behind a surface that interweaves sound and sense in immaculately interesting ways." — Jane Hirshfield, Common Boundary; "The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness." — Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle.
Every day you say, Just one more try. Then another irrecoverable day slips by. You will say ankle, you will say knuckle; why won't you why won't you say uncle?
Corners
All but saints and hermits mean to paint themselves toward an exit
leaving a pleasant ocean of azure or jonquil ending neatly at the doorsill.
But sometimes something happens:
a minor dislocation by which the doors and windows undergo a small rotation to the left a little
—but repeatedly. It isn't obvious immediately.
Only toward evening and from the farthest corners of the houses of the painters
comes a chorus of individual keening as of kenneled dogs someone is mistreating.
Star Block
There is no such thing as star block. We do not think of locking out the light of other galaxies. It is light so rinsed of impurities (heat, for instance) that it excites no antibodies in us. Yet people are curiously soluble in starlight. Bathed in its absence of insistence their substance loosens willingly, their bright designsdissolve. Not proximity but distance burns us with love.
Mockingbird
Nothing whole is so bold, we sense. Nothing not cracked is so exact and of a piece. He's the distempered emperor of parts, the king of patch, the master of pastiche, who so hashes other birds' laments, so minces their capriccios, that the dazzle of dispatch displaces the originals. As though brio really does beat feeling, the way two aces beat three hearts when it's cards you're dealing.
A Hundred Bolts of Satin
All you have to lose is one connection and the mind uncouples all the way back. It seems to have been a train. There seems to have been a track. The things that you unpack from the abandoned cars cannot sustain life: a crate of tractor axles, for example,
a dozen dozen clasp knives, a hundred bolts of satin— perhaps you specialized more than you imagined.
The Excluded Animals
Only a certain claque of beasts is part of the crèche racket
forming a steamy-breathed semicircle around the baby basket.
Anything more exotic than a camel is out of luck this season.
Not that the excluded animals envy the long-lashed sycophants;
cormorants don't toady, nor do toads adore anybody for any reason.
Nor do the unchosen alligators, grinning their three-foot grin as they laze in the blankety waters like the blankets on Him.
Blandeur
If it please God, let less happen. Even out Earth's rondure, flatten Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher, widen fissures to arable land, remand your terrible glaciers and silence their calving, halving or doubling all geographical features toward the mean. Unlean against our hearts. Withdraw your grandeur from these parts.
Composition
Language is a diluted aspect of matter.
—Joseph Brodsky
No. Not diluted. Flaked; wafered; but not watered. Language is matter leafing like a book with the good taste of rust and exposure the way ironwork petals near the coast. But so many more colors than rust: or, argent, others— a vast heraldic shield of beautiful readable fragments revealed as Earth delaminates: how the metals scatter, how matter turns animate.
Patience
Patience is wider than one once envisioned, with ribbons of rivers and distant ranges and tasks undertaken and finished with modest relish by natives in their native dress. Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable— a place with its own harvests. Or that in time's fullness
the diamonds of patience couldn't be distinguished from the genuine in brilliance or hardness.
Coming and Going
There is a recently discovered order, neither sponges nor fishes, which is never at the mercy of conditions. If currents shift, these fleshy zeppelins can reverse directions from inside— their guts are so easily modified. Coming versus going is therefore not the crisis it is for people,
who have to scramble to keep anything from showing when we see what we can't see coming, going.
