Two-term United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner (The Best of It, 2010), Kay Ryan of Northern California has won nearly every poetry prize existent. Her poems are famously short, and those in her collection Erratic Facts are no exception. Like championship banners hanging from the rafters of storied basketball arenas, they are tight vertical ribbons of two- to four-word lines. They're deceptively easy to scan, but not so easy to digest. A metaphor here, a colloquialism turned on its ear there--they do what poetry does so well: make us see our world a little differently, force us to think.
Ryan likes to lead her poems with epigraphs, and there are many here--including a few from W.G. Sebald (who may be better in epigraph than in book-length). "Monk Style" takes its epigraph from an NPR segment ("It was hard for [Thelonious] Monk to play Monk"), which she bends to conclude:
Monk must
approach himself,
join himself
at the bench
and sit awhile.
Then slip his
hands into his
hands Monk
style.
Ryan didn't come to fame until late in her 50s and has earned her wisdom. As one ages, things don't matter so much--or perhaps they matter even more. Erratic Facts reflects a great poet still standing on her peak. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.