Elephant Rocks: Poems
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."Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.