Resistance to the Unreal: Michael Ryan's New and Selected Poems

The first of the new poems, "A Two-Year-Old Girl in a Restaurant" shares with "Reminder" (and a series of other recent pieces) the use of a Dickinson-influenced quatrain stanza. It pushes toward character and scene, at least initially, in order to subject the speaker's feelings about "the world's pain" to the rigor of a test, the test of the portraying voice-how to describe an inherently dramatic event in ways that are felt and convincing. There are two kinds of projection going on in the first couple of stanzas. The first being the playing out of the scene across a screen tightly-framed by the quatrains with their use of rhyme that is insistent but irregular. The other can be heard in the way the syntax of the voice flows over and through those rhymes, translating the attentiveness that signals Ryan's presence.

Your delight, which is contagious,

has been occasioned by

the twinkling point of a steak knife

about to liquify your eye,

so when your father swats it

from your prehensile fist

you squinch your blooming face

tight as a blastocyst

as if all the world's pain

had conceived inside your skull...

The language is clear, direct, some would say simple, but the reality it portrays is complex in its implications. Tonally, the poem works by understating a potentially melodramatic scene. This understatement depends on objectivity, with an enormous and calm precision going into the detailing. Even so, there are eruptions all over the surface of the syntax-"contagious," "twinkling," "liquify," "prehensile," "squinch," "blastocyst." At first, they register as part of the sure-footed forward impulse propelling the voice down the page. They give it vitality and variation on a sonic level. But they also snag and retard the calm, controlled, assertive motion of the speech across the lines; they create tensions, the dictional equivalent to Dickinson's use of short, angular phrasal units to disrupt the speed of syntax. And Ryan's use of rhyme here does something similar, simultaneously guiding the outward-motion of the sentence while creating rips in the current (the use of end rhyme and intensified internal rhyme is terrifically managed, so that you get odd little echo transformations like "fist-blooming face-blastocyst" or "delight-steak knife-prehensile").

The compression and impulse that Ryan puts in play here makes sense given the selectivity of the imagery. The first stanza is dominated by a single tight close-up of the steak knife and the eye it threatens-the point of view seems almost the knife's (in the same way that the point of view in

Frost's "Out, Out..." always seems to be that of the saw about to cut the farm boy's hand off). When Ryan pulls back in the second stanza, the scale of perception shifts rapidly from line to line (from the girl's father to her fist to the squinchedup face to the metaphorical blastocyst), so that the girl seems to be almost hurled backward, towards and through the moment when she was conceived, back nearly all the way to non-existence. This is enacted feeling and meaning, in a way that can happen only in a poem. But what I especially admire about the poem is that it isn't particularly or essentially a portrait of parental anxiety or the random dangers of the world-at-large. It's real subject is the incomprehensibility of pain and cruelty, and the ways in which from childhood to old age this incomprehension can fill us. No amount of experience keeps us from being surprised then. The true drama here is the drama of recognition-not the surface drama of event. It's the story of the effort that has to take place in order for us to acknowledge what we share in suffering.