As Ever: Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin)
"Just a little bit does the magic" writes Kyger halfway into her belated, ecstatic debut on the national stage with a large house. Sharing, with poets such as Philip Whalen and David Meltzer, a love of William Carlos Williams and Zen Buddhism, Kyger patiently and confidently navigates her present-tense diarist lyric as it moves across the page. A Bolinas neighbor of Richard Brautigan, she's capable of hippie dizziness that soars to populist heights: "Everybody practices magic whether they know it or not Oh I'm worn out just watching the cats lick their fur." But where her more beat-influenced colleagues would compensate for their lighter moments with wrenching despair, Kyger opts instead for level-headed surprises: "Man get relaxed Woman get permanent." Though formalists may object to her apparent artlessness, Kyger's obsession for detail draws on a passionate intelligence that is seldom trivial. In fact, it's her genius for moment-by-moment description that provokes her to modesty, in opposition to the completist's mania: "But why does he want to do that, write down all the road signs from here to the east coast." While many writers have spoken of their work as one continuous project, Kyger's oeuvre actually holds together in this selection from her 20-plus books; throughout, her prosody, both aural and visual, is pitch perfect.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.