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• First a gripe about 'selected' - OK caveat emptor but they remind me of 'greatest hits' with cds, where some essential tracks will be omitted so the manufacturers can force you to buy more. They're a taster, but no more. If you buy this Carcanet edition of Kay Ryan's poems, you also need the US version 'The Best of It' which has more - but the Carcanet has some different ones. And of course neither is a substitute for each individual volume - even when there is a hefty selection, there are inexplicable order changes which impact on the overall effect. So, now that's off my chest - Kay Ryan. On the back of this book, Harold Bloom mentions Emerson and Dickinson. I was struck by a kinship with Samuel Menashe. Both poets examine language with an intensity that is quite scary and pare it down to the bones, yet manage to say more in a few short lines than many poets achieve in poems several pages long. Ryan makes you pay attention, shakes you out of any complacent beliefs. She takes trite sayings and interrogates them - one of my favourites is 'Home to Roost', where 'the chickens/are circling and/blotting out the/day' - or try 'Half a Loaf', which she doesn't think you should settle for: 'I say do not adjust to half/Unless you must'. She worries about 'how dark/is darkest?' in 'It's Always Darkest Before the Dawn', and astutely decides that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be: 'One can't work/by lime light'. She produces perfect images: 'as neatly as peas/in their green canoe' and 'Poetry is a kind of money/whose value depends upon reserves'. So - caveats aside - this is a volume of poems that give endless delight both by their brilliance in wordplay and by their ethical and intellectual concerns

  5.00 out of 5

  brunhilde

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