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Odd BlocksSelected and New PoemsKay Ryan10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: American, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Jul 2012) 9781847779755 £12.95 £11.65 Paperback (160 pages) (Pub. Aug 2011) 9781847771308 Out of Stock To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
Flamingo Watching
Wherever the flamingo goes, she brings a city's worth of furbelows. She seems unnatural by nature - too vivid and peculiar a structure to be pretty, and flexible to the point of oddity. Perched on those legs, anything she does seems like an act. Descending on her egg or draping her head along her back, she's too exact and sinuous to convince an audience she's serious. The natural elect, they think, would be less pink, less able to relax their necks, less flamboyant in general. They privately expect that it's some poorly jointed bland grey animal with mitts for hands whom God protects.
In Odd Blocks Kay Ryan, the acclaimed American poet, presents her work to European readers for the first time. The book includes twenty-one new poems, seven of them first published here. Ryan’s flamboyant imagination sparks in spare and elegant verse. ‘Edges,’ she has said, ‘are the most powerful parts of the poem. The more edges you have the more power you have.’ These poems take by surprise, and increase in resonance.
Cover photograph David Goldes Platonic Solids # 2, 2002. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
Contents
from Flamingo Watching (1994) Flamingo Watching This Life Emptiness Vacation No Rest for the Idle Glass Slippers When Fishing Fails So Different Half a Loaf Spring Impersonal I Marveled at How Generally I Was Aided Force Miners’ Canaries The Hinge of Spring Deer Poetry Is a Kind of Money Masterworks of Ming Paired Things Osprey Turtle from Elephant Rocks (1996) Living with Stripes Doubt Mirage Oases Chemistry Dew Crib Bestiary How Birds Sing If the Moon Happened Once New Clothes Crustacean Island Les Petites Confitures Why Isn’t It All More Marked Learning Age Counsel Silence A Cat/A Future Hope Losses The Cabinet of Curiosities Her Politeness Swept Up Whole Any Morning Relief A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water Distance Wooden Heat from Say Uncle (2000) Say Uncle Star Block Corners A Hundred Bolts of Satin The Excluded Animals Mockingbird Blandeur Patience That Will to Divest Winter Fear Grazing Horses The Fourth Wise Man Help The Pieces that Fall to Earth Don’t Look Back It’s Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn Herring The Silence Islands Cheshire Yeses Crown Among English Verbs Lime Light Why We Must Struggle Drops in the Bucket The Job Failure Failure 2 Matrigupta Water under the Bridge from The Niagara River (2005) The Niagara River Home to Roost Carrying a Ladder Sharks’ Teeth Weak Forces The Elephant in the Room A Ball Rolls on a Point The Best of It Shipwreck The Other Shoe Atlas He Lit a Fire with Icicles Rats’ Tails Chop Felix Crow Desert Reservoirs Expectations Ideal Audience Stardust Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard The Past Reverse Drama Least Action Chart No Names Thieves Late Justice Lighthouse Keeping Tune New Poems Odd Blocks The Edges of Time Bait Goat Train-Track Figure Virga Dogleg Ledge The Pharaohs Pentimenti Bitter Pill Finish Easter Island Spiderweb Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose Monk Style On the Nature of Understanding The Main Difficulty of Water Wheels Splitting Ice Shoot the Moon More of the Same The First of Never Index of Titles
'Her poems are exhilarating, strange affairs, like Satie miniatures or Cornell boxes. [â¦] Her sceptical imagination is pungent, her control masterful.'
J.D. McClatchy, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry '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 'These are fine poems that inspire us with poetryâs greatest gifts: the music of language and the force of wisdom.' Annie Dillard 'You can't help consuming Kay Ryan's poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back -- what was that? -- and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you.' The New York Times |
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