Elephant Rocks
Poems
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- US$9.99
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- US$9.99
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The former US Poet Laureate shares "fine poems that inspire us with poetry's greatest gifts: the music of language and the force of wisdom" (Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize–winning author).
Elephant Rocks, Kay Ryan's third book of verse, shows a virtuoso practitioner at the top of her form. Engaging and secretive, provocative and profound, Ryan's poems have generated growing excitement with their appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Sometimes gaudily ornamental, sometimes Shaker-plain, here is verse that is compact on the page and expansive in the mind.
"Kay Ryan makes it all fresh again with her highly original vision, her elegant, quirky craft. These poems look easy, but the deeper one delves, the more they astonish and astound." —May Sarton, New York Times–bestselling author of At Eighty-Two
"Kay Ryan works toward an exciting art, much less sparse than it looks. This is natural history seen from an angle of vision that Emerson and Dickinson would have approved. It refreshes me to find poems that require and reward rereading as much as these do." —Harold Bloom, literary critic and author of The Bright Book of Life
"The music of these poems is every bit as seductive as their reasoning. Her thinking flaunts the plush, irresistible textures of organic growth . . . Marvelous." —Boston Review
"These poems show a poet who is terribly sly in her reckoning of our world." —David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems
"So original, so astute, so pleasurable are the poems in this book, it wouldn't be at all surprising if they're still being read long after current critical fashions are dated." —Poetry
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ryan's third book of poems, following Flamingo Watching (1994), is a meditation on a quirky, quixotic natural world full of animal-shaped rocks and other oddities ("There could be an island paradise/ where crustaceans prevail"). In a style characterized by formal elegance and extreme economy of language ("As some people age,/ they kinden"), Ryan's work is a unique blend of careful observation of the external world of sensation and a faithful documentation of the inner world of thought. Her work recalls Dickinson's in substance as in directness: "We know it is close/ to something lofty./ Simply getting over being sick/ or finding lost property." Although at times her terse, rhyming verses have the patness of nursery rhymes ("A thought is dumb,/ without eyes, ears,/ opposable thumb,/ or a tongue''), her best poems are resonant and memorable precisely because they are so compressed and because the images they contain are so insightfully and provocatively given: "The grains shall be collected/ from the thousand shores/ to which they found their way,/ and the boulder restored."
