"It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." Whether or not you agree with that ominous pronouncement from William Carlos Williams, you will come away from former U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Kay Ryan's refreshing Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose--her first collection of nonfiction--with a deeper appreciation of poetry's worth.
The 32 pieces in this volume balance criticism (more appropriately, appreciation--save for a mild poke at Walt Whitman) of some of Ryan's favorite poets and other literary essays with a few helpings of memoir. Most of her subjects, including Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, will be well-known to even casual students of poetry. But Ryan devotes two affectionate, if candid, essays to the British poet Stevie Smith, someone who "does everything possible to cartoonify herself and her work," yet whose poems "can't in the long run be separated from the True, the Beautiful, the Timeless, the deeply moving."
Ever the iconoclast, Ryan derides the common advice to poets (or writers in general for that matter) to keep a notebook. To her, they are "the devil's bible. They are the books of understanding later." But despite her admonition about the "importance to the poet of avoiding or ignoring Kodak moments," Ryan writes with great feeling about the day she became a poet, "a mystery before which one must simply bow down." In her case, it occurred in the Colorado Rockies, on a cross-country bicycle trip she took in 1976, at age 30. The rest, as one might say, is history. Or poetry. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer