Review by Booklist Review
Nominated for a National Book Award for his first collection and winner of a National Poetry Series award for his second, Ryan investigates, in his latest volume, the mysteries embedded in the everyday. So much love appears on page after page--not only the romantic, erotic variety, but also and more importantly the spiritual union of the poet with the world--that one is left humbled by witnessing such visionary power. The volume's opening poem, "Not the End of the World," prepares us for the poet's affair. Yet there is never a hint of sentimentality. Instead, Ryan walks a tightrope between subjectivity and objectivity, offering the reader neither too much of one nor not enough of the other. A distinctive collection. --Jim Elledge
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ryan's disarming voice in his third poetry collection (after In Winter and Threats Instead of Trees ) is a quietly intimate one: ``I think of myself as dust of bones / mornings when I awake / to find the fine white ash / lining the bottom of my box stove.'' Revelations like these occur at odd, unexpected moments--as the poet tends a bird that flies down the chimney into his wood stove, or contemplates a newspaper clipping about a prison marriage, or watches Bertolucci's film 1900 , or recalls an incident from his oppressive childhood. There are occasional pieces (``Meeting Cheever,'' ``A Buglary''), a villanelle, free-form verses and metrical quatrains tinged with the wistful irony of W. D. Snodgrass. With almost reportorial detachment, Ryan meditates on a friend's suicide, the Holocaust, severely injured children in a hospice. Nearly all of the poems are marked by the control of a meticulous craftsman seeking transcendent meanings in ordinary events. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Ryan speaks plainly of plain things, and the result is remarkable poetry. Avoiding agenda, he uses colloquial language bent slightly to his needs--``he saw that this was the way/ they could no longer talk together''--to discover the particular resonance of each event, whether bicycling, freeing a bird from a chimney, or reflecting on a burglary. The discovery is often delivered with a punch at poem's end. Thus, losing his contacts when swimming ``to get skinny,'' the poet is reminded of a ``friend diving at dusk/ in that mountain lake for his daughter/ and what came to him when his hands/ sank into the cold mud at the bottom.'' Occasionally, the punch is not so decisive, but most of the time Ryan is remarkably on target. A fresh new collection from one of the most distinctive poets writing today.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal '' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
