The former US Poet Laureate shares “fine poems that inspire us with poetry’s greatest 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 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
Author
Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Ryan's tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges like the one in Marin County, California where she and her partner Carol Adair taught for over thirty years. In an interview with the Washington City Paper at the end of tenure, Ryan called herself a “whistle-blower” who “advocated for much underpraised and underfunded community colleges across the nation.” Ryan’s surprising laureateship capped years of outsider-status in the poetry world. Her quizzical, philosophical, often mordant poetry is a product of years of thought. Ryan has said that her poems do not start with imagery or sound, but rather develop “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” Critic Meghan O’Rourke has written of her work: “Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them.” “Sharks’ Teeth” displays that meandering approach to her subject matter, which, Ryan says, “gives my poems a coolness. I can touch things that are very hot because I’ve given them some distance.” Kay Ryan is the recipient of several major awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has received the Union League Poetry Prize and the Maurice English Poetry Award, as well as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Since 2006 she has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
