Crisis Actor
Poems
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The brilliant and bracing debut collection of poetry from Declan Ryan: a writer, critic, and fierce new literary voice.
Declan Ryan's Crisis Actor chronicles various kinds of failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees, a hanged donkey and a bloated rat, solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths—these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash in rueful self-accusation and laconic skepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage, and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightness of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who—in Matthew Arnold’s words—"has reached his utmost limits and finds . . . himself far less than he had imagined himself."
But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous afternoons in pubs cheering for hard-won triumphs. These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach toward grace and redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ryan layers his finely crafted debut collection with precise, nostalgic, and striking poems that probe the past and present. His verse shines in sonically rich descriptions: "Last of the nectar days, hind-end of the country,/ the afternoon readying itself to make excuses/ and leave us to our unslept dishevelment./ Some nameless river goes by; the sun makes brilliant hoops/ from tarnished glasses" ("Mayfly"). The title sequence is written in memory of Ian Hamilton and borrows from interviews with the writer as the speaker faces his own reckoning. It opens, "The sullen years feeling righteously combative,/ a stirred-up need for mission, a rage against the pros,/ taking each line personally." Ryan complicates a catalog of images with candor: "the self-produced, self-published oxblood books;/ the ‘semi-literate phase', the beer before the launch/ to this already being the best of it, but still unsatisfied;/ the wanting people who wouldn't give my parents/ the time of day to owe me favours." He describes in the poem's first stanza "some playacting impulse hovering among the bargain bins," which contrasts and complements the italicized second stanza, "It can't be overestimated, the impact that had, what he thought masculinity was, what it meant to be a man." The sequence ends gorgeously: "‘It's all about goodbyes, or being late.../ I know that you won't let me call it love.'" These poems are full of humanity, rewarding insights, and affective phrases.
