Stealthy Insights Amid Short Phrases
By Dwight Garner
Published: March 4, 2010, New York Times


THE BEST OF IT
New and Selected Poems
By Kay Ryan270 pages. Grove Press. $24.

Kay Ryan’s poems are as slim as runway models, so tiny you could almost tweet them. Their compact refinement, though, does not suggest ease or chic. Her voice is quizzical and impertinent, funny in uncomfortable ways, scuffed by failure and loss. Her mastery, like Emily Dickinson’s, has some awkwardness in it, some essential gawkiness that draws you close.


Ms. Ryan’s new book, “The Best of It,” is a generous and nearly career-spanning collection of her verse (it omits poems from her earliest books), a greatest-hits album of a sort. But its title isn’t a generic boast. “The Best of It” is also the name of a pint-size destroyer from her volume “The Niagara River” (2005), a poem that reads in its entirety:


However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

Ms. Ryan, born in 1945, is an unusual poet and an unusual person. Her father was an oil-well driller in the San Joaquin Valley of California. She attended a community college before the University of California, Los Angeles, and published her first book of poems, “Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends” (1983), herself.

She is now the 16th poet laureate of the United States, but she mostly steers clear of the poetry world’s junketeering, its voluptuous horror of conferences and panels and M.F.A. programs. She has taught the same remedial English course, at the same community college in Marin County, Calif., for more than 30 years.
The full review at NYT.