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. She has had a career teaching English at the College of Marin and has leveraged her renown to champion community college education and take a few pokes at the academic poetry universe ("I think there's too much poetry out there. I don't need to add to the waste stream," she told the Paris Review in 2008). 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.
She also uses common phrases as titles ("Token Loss" or "Shoot the Moon") before twisting them into some fresh meaning. "Fool's Errands" is a good example:
A thing
cannot be
delivered
enough times:
this is the
rule of dogs
for whom there
are no fool's
errands. To
loop out and
come back is
good all alone.
It's gravy to
carry a ball
or a bone.
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. As she says in "Miser Time":
Miser time grows
profligate near the
end: unpinching
and unplanning,
abandoning the
whole idea of
savings.
Erratic Facts reflects a great poet still standing on her peak. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.
Shelf Talker: The wise, frisky and concise poems in Pulitzer Prize winner Kay Ryan's Erratic Facts reinforce her already stellar reputation.