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

It's not that Ryan turns to narrative as an abandonment of intelligence, but that his intelligence uses story to try to re-wire its circuitry, enabling the "self-forgetful" intimacy and compassion that are its only possible relief. There's a great deal of talk about desire in In Winter, as well as the need to be open. But these things feel more or less like "ideas." Ryan seems mostly to be talking around and about them, even if insightfully. He never quite allows them to posses the writing. The exceptions are those poems most fully involved with memory, where the writing pushes through into the physical world. There's a new kind of vulnerability here, the control less assertive, or less interested in authority. In "Memory" and in the book's title poem, there's a tone of greater directness. Narrative movement is at the core of this; but so is that inflection in a human voice that Ted Hughes referred to as "the imprint of intimate presence."

IN WINTER

At four o'clock it's dark.

Today, looking out through dusk

at three women in stretch slacks

chatting in front of the post office,

their steps left and right and back

like some quick folk dance of kindness,

I remembered the winter we spent

crying in each other's laps.

What could you be thinking at this moment?

How lovely and strange the gangly spires

of trees against a thickening sky

as you drive from the library

humming off-key? Or are you smiling

at an idea met in a book

the way you smiled with your whole body

the first night we met?

I was so sure my love of you was perfect,

and the light today

reminded me of the winter you drove home

each day in the dark at four o'clock

and would come into my study to kiss me

despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

If the longer meditative poems advance on the logic of tightly-reasoned probing, this has the tentativeness and vulnerability of personal conversation. The voice is present to itself in a different way, poised but relaxed, less self-conscious, less distant (which is odd considering that the narration is focused on a memory of a moment of remembering, twice-removed from its sources). The failures of love that lie just under the surface of the poem are off-set by curiosity and tenderness-the effort to imagine what the lover is doing right at this moment in the present has an unforced, understated charm. The questions (especially the second) are a wish for well-being; for the woman who is remembered, naturally, but also for the speaker, since his capacity for generosity and self-honesty is what's really at stake. The poem is composed not as a continuous narrative but as a quick succession of discrete scenes, like camera shots in a movie. This narration is the storyline of a mood or feeling. And the mood at the end isn't so much about dismay as it is about a sad wonderment.

The use of narrative scenes pointed Ryan toward a way to make a different kind of shape in a poem, a shape "that may not encompass the facts," but that would give up many of the toolings of argument so as to be more open to the unexpectedness, the "realness," of feeling and event. What Ryan could write after this would be carried more by attention to the world and others than to the self. His voice would be much more expansive in its designs and spirit. Not so much unleashed as inclusive. It would also feel more "spoken" than ever before, its syntax alert to the possibilities of colloquial speech.