Ryan, Kay. The Niagara River. Grove Press Poetry Series, 2005. 72 pp. $13.00 (paper).
Reviewed by Marcela Malek Sulak
The work of the contemporary lyricist may be that of ordering the chaos that swirls around the shell-shocked I. But Kay Ryan’s long, thin poems are the tempest’s very stir sticks. And isn’t that a relief sometimes? Who wouldn’t rather be the two-year-old dumping out a toy box than authority that tidies everything back up? The Niagara River, Ryan’s sixth book, continues the joyful project of her first five collections, that of unraveling the established order of language and logic, calmly, mischievously. Disassembled, the individual mundane contents-magnets, ice, silence, dull, overused clichés like stardust and the drop of the second shoe-stretch out in new unfamiliarity and glow a little. As the title poem puts it:
______________We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means. (p.1)
Ryan’s poems ask and permit us to examine the overlooked objects of the world and make them our own again; language is simply another of the world’s natural objects. With her we hold them to the light, turn them in our hands and our minds, and then we have to decide what to do with them.
In some ways the public life of the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate resembles one of her own poems. The headline to the New York Times article announcing Ryan’s new position contains the words “outsider,” and “sly.” Here, “outsider” should not mean that Ryan was innocent of the awards and laurels of poetry before becoming Poet Laureate. Indeed, in 2004 she won one of the largest and most prestigious poetry prizes given to an American poet, the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Prize. She’s also won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Today she publishes in the most recognized poetry journals. No, the adjective “outsider” possibly one of the most misused words in the English language, refers to her Teflon-coated personae to which notoriety has refused to stick: Ryan is a self-described private person. “She would certainly be part of the world if she could manage it,” Dana Gioia, chairman of the National endowment for the Arts, has said of her.
And “outsider” probably also refers to her approach to her subject matter. Ryan comes at large and small topics obliquely, passing through the world we inhabit to reach the world that lives in us. For example, the Pushcart-prize poem “Chinese Foot Chart,” arrives at the mercies of the human heart through an examination of the anatomy of the foot and the mechanisms of canal systems and shipping.
Every part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch We are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock (10)
In this poem, as in so many others, arriving at the self is to arrive simultaneously at the release from the “remote locks” of the self. This release is not an escape, but a journey, in the sense of moving toward something unstated and undefined.
In fact, the subtle emotion and warmth of the poems lies in the intimacy of distances that allow us to reach outward, towards. Two poems illustrate this idea very well. The title of “Lighthouse Keeping” (65), an aural pun on “light housekeeping,” opens the poem up to intimacies on multiple planes and depths:
Seas pleat
winds keen
fogs deepen
ships lean no
doubt, and
the lighthouse
keeper keeps
a light for
those left out.
It is intimate
and remote both
for the keeper
and those afloat.
As in most of Ryan’s poems, the way the line is broken allows for certain words and phrases to be read in multiple ways. In the second sentence, “both” could refer to “intimate and remote,” but it can also refer to ” those afloat” and the lighthouse keeper. The poem’s refusal to limit itself to a single choice or a single perspective performs its central metaphor, revealing the inextricable relationship between intimacy and remoteness. For, the poem suggests, it is the act of floating, the act of being separate, that allows for connection. The connection is not direct; the keeper and the floater are joined by light. Connection, then, is the mutual experience of the world, then, this luminous distance.
“Absences and Leaks” is also a meditation on intimacy, and an explanation for the need for distance: “it’s what we can’t / know that interests / us” the speaker notes. Examining an archeological dig, the speaker realizes
______________our
love of hints, our
mending minds that
love to patch up
other times like
plates, and how this
might extrapolate
to hearts: explaining
how here can be
too much matching part (65)
The poem can also be a sort of instruction manual for reading the entire book, which calls upon the capacity of our “mending minds” to “patch up” while recognizing an aversion to the pat, well thought out or “too much matching.”
One of the ways these poems allow for extrapolation, matching and patching is through the quirky presence of rhymes, which stick out like random pins in crookedly sewn seams. Rhyme, as we know, works like metaphor-reinforcing the previously unexplored connection between two disparate objects, or yoking together two incompatible ideas to enhance their dissonance. Ryan’s rhymes tend to accomplish the former. However, they may be called “sly” (another word in the NYT headline) not only because they appear randomly, but because they direct our steps without seeming to do so. Each of Ryan’s rhymes work by harnessing a subject to an object with sound, if not with syntax. Here, the minds patch times. The plates allow us to extrapolate. The heart shies away from the matching part.
Finally, in celebrating what is askew, aslant, not quite logical, Ryan cautions us from becoming too comfortable with any of the patterns and keys we have discovered for reading the poems. This cautionary note may be necessary because, at times, the mechanics of the poems can become somewhat predictable. In the poem “Thieves” (70), the penultimate in this collection, the poker-faced speaker notes
When a word
is lifted from
its spot, we show
no surprise,
replacing supplies
with provender.
Yet when she concludes
But back at the ranch,
a hoard is building.
The thieves are
hatching some
fantastic plot
made out of parts
we’d laugh to think
that they thought
matched
we are not quite sure if we are the thieves hatching plots, the laughing rubes who have just been duped without realizing it, or the participants of social commerce who refuse to lose sight of the forest for the trees. After all, haven’t we just realized that our mending minds work best when primed by absence and illogic? And yet, don’t we all wish certain political leaders were a little more respectful of the meaning, pronunciation, and the emotional and historical landscape of certain words? My guess is that we are all of the above. And it’s nice to be able to occupy so many different positions in one very narrow highway of a poem.
____________
MARCELA SULAK is the author of two collections of poetry, Immigrant (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press) and Of All The Things That Don’t Exist, I Love You Best. She has translated three collections of poetry from the Czech Republic and Congo-Zaire, and is currently completing a scholarly study of immigrant poets in inter-war New York. She is an assistant professor of literature at American University.
