An impassioned, sometimes prickly tribute to the poet’s art.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning former U.S. poet laureate considers her craft and inspirations with a smirk and the occasional dash of snark.
The essays and reviews in Ryan’s (Erratic Facts, 2015, etc.) first prose collection reveal a careful poet who’s also careful not to take her job too seriously. Quite often, she responds with bemusement—if not outright laughter—at the confusions and ironies in work she admires, laughter being “one of the body’s natural responses to shock.” Marianne Moore’s abstracted verse is “at once ridiculous and immensely cheering”; Wallace Stevens’ poems “have a hilarity that isn’t funny, a joie without the vivre”; Annie Dillard is “hilarious...the terrible child experimenting upon the innocent parental flesh.” Reading the puckish Stevie Smith, Ryan declares, “it gives me so much hope, to see language get pantsed.” None of which is to say that the author is dismissive of understanding poetry in sophisticated ways; the book is rich in close readings of works by Smith, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Philip Larkin. Plus, her choices of metaphor are delicious: Moore’s inscrutable lines land “in one’s lap like inedible melons,” and she herself is a “pig for pleasure.” However, she also cultivates a sensibility of not wanting to delve too deeply into poems lest their magic be spoiled. That’s reasonable, up to the point where she takes it out on other writers, from a gentle chastisement of those who keep notebooks to a more aggressive field report from a writers’ conference, in which she felt an “abstract contempt for everyone in attendance.” Ryan’s love of poetry is palpable and intense, but she approaches writing about it as if it were, well, a bit of a joke. When it comes to poetry, she writes that “in order to listen we must be a little bit relieved of the intention to understand.”
An impassioned, sometimes prickly tribute to the poet’s art.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4818-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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