The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

My taste in poetry - akin to my taste is music - is quite broad and undefined. There is the stuff I was brought up on, old favorites and standards, like Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson and the Bard. And then there's material that's new to me including works by Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Richard Siken.

I would put Ryan in the latter category for more than just being new to me, but she is so like Dickinson in their love of economy of word choice that she does not quite fit there. So, for me she bridges the gap between the groups despite being one of the more recent poets of the bunch. (And she's been consistently published since the '80s, whereas Siken seems to only have done Crush.) Anyway, the point is that she's good. And she subverted my expectation of there being poems with explicit lesbian elements, which is always interesting.

This collection is a cross-section of her published work, so there were poems that did not make it in, but it's refreshing to open it up to any of the poems and not be hit over the head with Being Queer Is Hard And Sad stick. (I get that often enough from just about anything with LGBT themes, which can be really frustrating.) Though I do find it odd that while she's subverting expectations that there is no poem in the book that celebrates her love of women or even just the love that she shares with her partner.

Not that there aren't any poems implicitly about love and its power, but they have an impersonal air to them, which leaves me with the impression that she wants to keep her private life private. And, well, considering my ability to ramble about anything and everything with complete strangers in varying types of situations, I have a lot of respect for that sort of restraint. Then again, that seems to be an intrinsic part of her work, since she avoids repetition and flowery language unless the intended image calls for it. It can be seen all over, but it's best used in the following:

"Intention"
Kay Ryan

Intention doesn't sweeten.
It should be picked young
and eaten. Sometimes only hours
separate the cotyledon
from the wooden plant.
Then if you want to eat it,
you can't.

She does have poems that use more than just the bare bones to create images and feelings, but they are quite rare and worth the find.

So, er, to sum things up, read her! You can find this collection of poetry specifically due to its dust jacket's cover image being silhouettes of Joshua trees, so it's not as though it is attempting to blend in with the others.