New and Selected Poems by Michael Ryan

reviewed by Ellen Cantrell

Michael Ryan tells stories in verse. He harnesses the gift of any great storyteller; he can live inside someone else's head, he can tell the story of a stranger and make it his own. Then, he makes it yours. Poetry has never required a scene or a plot, but Ryan's latest collection, New and Selected Poems, combines narrative and verse effortlessly.

New and Selected looks at the human condition through a magnifying glass. Ryan takes ordinary lives and rips them open at the seams. He writes about a father's death by alcohol, the suicide of an acquaintance, a lover abandoned, and a man struggling with addiction. He is often intensely personal in these poems, even when a stranger is his subject. The new poem "A Dead Girl" is a response to someone it seems he has never met. It is as if Ryan read about a girl "in dog collars and spikes" found dead under the pier in the back pages of a newspaper. Still, when he tells her story she was your next door neighbor when you were young; she was your classmate or your friend.

Beyond Ryan's eerie sense of the personal, his poetry is immediately intriguing for it's juxtaposition of quiet language and startling, thoughtful images. His voice is so simple and subdued that when a character is "sodomized with a beer bottle" in "Eschatology," the image bores into you unexpectedly and Ryan has no apologies.

He has published three previous volumes of poetry, Threats Instead of Trees, In Winter, and God Hunger. He has also published a collection of essays, A Difficult Grace: on Poets, Poetry, and Writing; a memoir, Baby B; and an autobiography, Secret Life. An award winning poet, Ryan's books have won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and the Lenore Marshall/ Nation Award, among others. He is currently a professor at the University of California-Irvine.

The poems Ryan included in New and Selected have an amazing amount of illusion and shape-shifting written into them. In the new poem "Flimsy," Ryan challenges the reader's awareness and perception of reality. He brings you inside the narrator's head only to throw you right back out and leave you scrambling for steady ground. In "Flimsy" Ryan shifts in and out of dream and reality with beautiful subtlety. In doing so he also sends you in and out of fear and danger. As in many of his poems, the final lines of "Flimsy"leave you stunned.

During a visit to Northwestern this fall, Ryan spoke unabashedly about his love for the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The hymn meter that Dickinson used so often, a form reminiscent of New England church hymns, is a favorite of Ryan's as well. A hymn meter poem is traditionally compromised of quatrain (four-lined) stanzas with shorter lines and various rhyme schemes. Ryan has taken this form and stretched it out like a pair of dryer-shrunk jeans, giving it new twists and turns.

Like Dickinson, Ryan chooses form as a foundation, not a prison. Where adherence to the form compliments, he uses it; where the words need to take a different direction, he follows. He creates his own rhyme schemes; he bends the form till it often seems only a shadow of the tradition - a jumping-off point for his creativity.

Ryan is at his best in his shorter poems, often using the quatrain forms he learned from Dickinson. He has the power to concentrate his ideas, to hand them over in small and frighteningly powerful packages. Next to this his longer poems, like "A Burglary" where a few items are stolen from his studio at a writer's retreat, feel diluted.

Ryan's poems are asking dubiously for God or meditating on death. They examine the complications of both childhood and adulthood, and through the book Ryan builds upon his own crafted character. Every story in New and Selected may well be about him, but he writes them in a way that they become about you, or at least some shadow of the self seen through others. A response to the suffering of others, a suffering that is the same as our own, this is New and Selected.