The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. By Kay Ryan. New York: Grove Press, 2010. 270 pp. $24.00 (cloth). Kay Ryan, the 2009-2010 United States Poet Laureate, is a spartan, earthy, and irreverent poet. The tide poem of her recent collection illustrates her faithfulness to the world of experience, no matter how that world fades and diminishes over time. The poem begins, However carved up / or pared down we get, /we keep on making/ the best of (p. 216). She is moved not by monuments and cataclysms but by the common occurrences and insignificant moments. Ryan is a religious poet, then her devotions are solitary domestic routines. The psalmist wrote of an inner quietness, heart is not lifted up, / my eyes are not raised too high (Ps. 131:1), and the prophet Isaiah wrote of a leveled and justified world in which valley shall be raised up and every mountain and hill made low (Isa. 40:4). Ryan is a poet of the routine day and the unremarkable landscape. Her poem Blandeur plays on Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet God's Grandeur and includes the lines* If it please God / let less happen. / Even out Earth's / rondure, flatten / Eiger, blanden / the Grand Canyon (p. 158). She writes with humility related to the psalmists and out of a vision related to the prophet's, giving ordinary things extraordinary attention. An accomplished poet of insignificant and unoccupied spaces, she honors simple sensory perceptions by wrapping them in the packages of small poems: It takes a courageous / person to leave spaces / empty (p. 38). In another of Gerard Manley Hopkins s sonnets catch fire and dragonflies draw flame, doing what dragonflies and kingfishers do naturally. Life flashing from the natural behaviors of these two winged creatures is noticed by the poet as natural praise. He reflects them in his religious poems of wonder and thanksgiving, which in turn flash with insight and brilliant language. Ryan's poems flame with the fire of perception as well, but the objects of her art and the subjects of her compositions typically are not the showy and iridescent but the everyday and run-of-the-mill. Still life fruit bowls, a blue ceramic doorknob, the accumulation of objects in our cars and junk drawers are all within the field of her calm eye. Short, enjambed lines slow the reader down to the unexpected quiver of an image or to the ripple of a single thought. Her poems are like delicate winged creatures: slight and shivering, thin and streaming, some with a bite or a sting. …