The Niagara River
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A mesmerizing collection from the US Poet Laureate whose work is “as intense and elliptical as [Emily] Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as [Robert] Frost” (J. D. McClatchy, American Poet).
In granting the prestigious Ruth Lilly Prize to Kay Ryan, Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman wrote that “[she] can take any subject and make it her own. Her poems—which combine extreme concision and formal expertise with broad subjects and deep feeling—could never be mistaken for anyone else’s. Her work has the kind of singularity and sustained integrity that are very, very rare.”
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Kay Ryan’s poems are “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The Niagara River is full of such hidden gems. Bafflingly effective, the poems in this collection seem too brief and blithe to pack so much wallop. Their singular music makes it clear why her poetry has been featured everywhere from the Sunday funnies to New York subways to plaques at the zoo to the pages of The New Yorker and The Paris Review (Salon).
“Empathic and wryly unforgiving of the human condition, the poems [in The Niagara River] are equal parts pith and punch. The effect is bracing.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In two or three shifty sentences per short-lined poem, Ryan brazenly questions the extent to which we are in control of, and thus responsible for, our own and others' suffering. Her work, in this sixth collection, operates in an American tradition stretching from Dickinson through Stevens and Frost to Ammons and Bronk, where fidelity to the natural world works as a scrim for staging such self-exploration. Observing how we tolerate (and even invite) all kinds of limits on relationships and growth, the poet, over the course of 60-odd short lyrics, charts the false progress of cultivation: "we keep on making / the best of it as though/ ...our garden/ could be one bean/ and we'd rejoice if/ it flourishes, as/ though one bean/ could nourish us." As a group of friends float toward the inevitable falls, the Niagara River becomes a metaphor for arrogance in the face of greater forces: "we do/ know this is the/ Niagara River, but/ it is hard to remember/ what that means." Action, here, is more a way of heading off inevitable loss than claiming
