This Morning

March 26, 2012
Sometimes, the poems in Michael Ryan’s fifth book—the first since his New and Selected Poems won the Kingsley Tufts Award in 2004—concentrate on matters so close at hand they appear charmingly picayune: a garbage truck persona poem, a reminiscence about surprisingly delicious airplane food, a description of a trusty coffee mug (“Glaze crazed and lip chipped, my beloved mug/ has suffered one too many Hi-Temp Power Scrubs”). But Ryan’s most obvious literary forbear is the British master Philip Larkin; Ryan’s own shivering depths, like Larkin’s, emerge when his frank and precise vision of the everyday stirs into darker material. “The Dog” charts a speaker’s frustrations when caring for an aged mutt whose owners have traveled to Big Sur to recover from their baby daughter’s death. Despite the speaker’s cruel sarcasm (“ ‘The dog is old,’ he said. Oh. Thanks.”) and apparent impatience (“I don’t like the dog. It stinks”), the poem’s conclusion forces us to consider that the animal may serve as the child’s most authentic mourner. “Dachau” recounts an uncanny day-trip to the concentration camp, a tragically comic miscommunication ending the journey. The language is sociable, alive with ordinary speech—though a number of poems also fall into well-wrought stanzaic and rhyming form. These are poems of marriage, citizenship, and the wages of family strife that pry impeccable tools into the cracks of unsettled lives.

February 15, 2012

The persona encountered in Ryan's fifth collection (after New and Selected Poems) is an ever more familiar one: the affable, contemplative professor-poet warily entering his senior years ("The death I see/ coming to me/ stops to chat/ more frequently"). But Ryan generally eschews the nostalgia characteristic of his demographic cohort to observe the present. Whether his subjects are somber (a patient at a melanoma treatment center, a recent visit to Dachau) or seemingly trivial (airplane meals, a garbage truck), he approaches them all with a disarming directness further sharpened by formal craftsmanship: "Because he left her, she must make him/ someone she doesn't love, rescripting as/ deception their hand-clasped walks at dusk." VERDICT Dickinsonian economy alternates with Wordsworthian largesse to suggest Ryan's breadth of academic influence, yet his tone remains unvaryingly personal and candid, if not downright modest ("I'm full of feelings, all of them boring"). Older readers will appreciate his seasoned perspective, while younger students of poetry can learn from his accomplished technique.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2012
In his introduction to Ryan's Threats Instead of Trees (1973), poet Stanley Kunitz sees a young man locked in the house of the dead with no key to salvation except his sex, his cunning, and his art. No longer young, Ryan now finds himself confronting a kind of autobiographical boredom, markedly unlike the libidinal recollections in Secret Life (1995), dealing still with work and sex through wit and art, however less beholden to form and therefore free to flirt with simplified, near-to-nursery rhymes. Perhaps most noticeably, Ryan has mastered imaginative navigation: an in-flight meal's bite-size Bundt cake occasions rumination on the supernal puffy napoleons of a made-up French pastry chef, a stand-in for the speaker's own relationship to art. Elsewhere, Ryan's speaker arrives in Dachau, Germany, and finds everyday activitiestoothpaste purchases, Weisswurst sandwichesgrotesque in their mundanity given the death camp's proximity. Yet it is this necessary history Ryan must investigate. Gazing at his daughter, he cannot help but see secrets within secretsthose we keep from lovers and loved ones, those we must save from ourselves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)