Poetry in Motion

The Niagara River

by Kay Ryan

Grove, 96 pp., $13

A FRUITFUL TENSION EXISTS IN contemporary poetry between the delicious excesses of the baroque style and the sly simplicities of the plain style. The dichotomy is an age-old one; for hundreds of years, poets have squared off along similar lines.

C.S. Lewis, in his provocative Oxford history, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954), contrasts the “drab” poets of the middle 1500s with the “golden” style of the late Elizabethans. Lewis’s very terms betray his preference for the honeyed music of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) over the unadorned rhythms of George Gascoigne (1534-77) and Barnaby Googe (1540-94). In response, critics such as Yvor Winters have capably shown “the smooth and plain style” (Googe’s words) to be every bit as forceful as the ornate. In the end, poetry in English cannot do without either tendency and, indeed, the two strains intertwine in the very DNA of the language, which happily weds the earthy monosyllables of Anglo-Saxon with the sesquipedalian lilt of Latin.

In characterizing the poems of Richard Howard’s latest collection, one is tempted to bypass “golden” as a description and head straight on to platinum. Now in his eighth decade, Howard has long been–along with the late James Merrill, who jokingly coined the phrase–one of American poetry’s “Great Fancies.”

“I know how you love dessert,” says the speaker of “In Loco Parentis,” and Howard clearly likes to indulge a stylistic sweet tooth of his own. Linguistic confections are served up with an extra dollop of crème Chantilly, like something out of a Wayne Thiebaud painting. But Howard has more on offer than sweets. Reading through his new poems, often gently linked by subject or theme, one may choose from a range of rich dishes. Their ingredients are gathered from high art and Western culture–painting, sculpture, opera, polyglot speech–and always salted with a pinch of gossip.

Howard’s many historical speakers (in dramatic monologues, letters, diaries), as well as their addressees and the figures they discuss, all attest to his fondness for the recherché and the exorbitant. The range is dizzying: from a poem in the voice of the editor Blanche Knopf (wife of Alfred A.), who receives a slight from Joseph Conrad in the Louvre; to an after-dinner address by the 18th-century painter Anton Raphael Mengs to his colleagues in Rome; to the lost diary entries of Cosima Wagner, in which she describes George Eliot chastising her and her husband, Richard, for their anti-Semitism; to the wildly precocious voice of Baby Ivory, an infant in a family portrait by the Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer; to a series of letters written to George Santayana by a former student, who tells of meeting Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, the famous dandy portrayed by Whistler, and the model for Proust’s Baron Palamède de Charlus.

Howard swathes his toney subjects in suitably opulent language. “The Silent Treatment,” an homage to the great contemporary sculptor Natalie Charkow Hollander (whose “Nine Caves and Their Inhabitants” graces the book cover), begins with these stanzas:

Howard spangles line after line with fireworks, beginning with the blooming of exotic place names. His characteristic play on the different senses of promise leads into the synesthetic flourish of “deafening darknesses.” Note how “luminous” reflects back on “bituminous,” and the phrase “glimpse of glistening sea enclosed by crags” ushers along its attendant “g”s with gusto. The rhythms of Howard’s exquisite syllabic verse readily accommodate such tour-de-force phrasing as “stretches of inhumation” (with its echo if “inhuman”) and the placement of “instantaneously,” which handily fills out its five-beat line with a single word.

Howard’s poems provide countless pleasures for the reader. Their almost hedonistic abandon–musically, tonally, syntactically–can be wildly intoxicating. Still, it occasionally feels as if one has sat down with an experienced absinthe drinker and been drunk under the table. Sometimes poems are better served like strong cups of coffee: clarifying, energizing, without the hangover. In the best poems here, Howard’s more sober themes resonate from even his most ingenious inventions. “A Mistaken Identity” elaborates the kooky notion that Howard, while viewing pictures in a gallery, has actually discovered that the boy depicted in one of Peter Paul Rubens’s earliest works is actually the poet’s own former student and friend, Craig Teicher. Howard, addressing the young man, wants to know what life was like back then, only to be met with Teicher’s silence.

Despite its wacky premise, the poem picks up on the elegiac note sounded by the book’s dedication to recently deceased friends, the poets Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht, and Mona Van Duyn. The poem concludes:

Faced with the mute past, with its great dead, Howard chooses the present, chooses life. His capacity for intimate, nearly erotic, intensity emblazons such passages in the memory. As the figure of Blanche Knopf says, early in the volume, “I want to discuss / something intimate. Not just / about you or me, but us: that’s what makes it / intimate.” Include in this “us” the poet and the reader. Howard’s signature gift circumscribes a paradox: He makes even his most far-flung subjects feel disquietingly close.

Kay Ryan’s poems radiate from the opposite end of the spectrum. Where Howard is a maximalist, she is a minimalist. Where Howard’s poems are centrifugal–spinning outward in an onrush of dramatic voices and wide-ranging allusions–Ryan’s are centripetal, carried inward on the idiosyncratic music of a singular voice that seldom refers to anything beyond the terms of the poem itself. Howard’s poems frequently span many pages; Ryan’s rarely exceed one. Howard sends the reader scampering for Webster’s; Ryan’s diction is largely monosyllabic in a way that old Barnaby Googe would have adored. Her willfully low-key ingredients are then leavened by one of the finest (and funniest) caustic wits in contemporary poetry, and by a humane melancholia that lends the poems urgency, and grounds them in deep feeling.

“Home to Roost” works its compressed magic on an old cliché:

At what point does the poem switch–delicately, almost imperceptibly–to a minor key? The comic notes sounded at the outset (flying chickens, indeed!), underscored by the internal rhyme day / way and the insistent “yes” meant to tweak our incredulity, produce a smirk. So does the travesty of Eliot’s “Because I do not hope to turn again” and Yeats’s “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” which dashes modernist poetics on the rocks of its own imperious shores.

But then comes the shudder of recognition: These birds represent something of great delicacy and variety; great care was taken in letting them loose “one at a time.” Well, here they are again, the poet tells us, returned in lockstep and with an ominous uniformity, like a parade of storm troopers. Chekhov is another modern writer who keeps us laughing until the moment we are brought up short by the opposite of laughter. Ryan closes with a showstopper, as “all” reaches up to claw at “small.” The poem sends our own personal chickens–the bitter specters of our best intentions–whirling into the air.

Occasionally, Ryan’s serendipitous rhymes and tightly turned ruminations approach a kind of light verse, sporting an against-the-grain delight in wit and a rare confidence that humor needn’t cancel the truth in a poem. “Atlas,” for example, tickles the reader while shrewdly identifying a palpable human experience:

The argument of the poem remains self-specific, its logic intact, while the experience it describes resonates broadly, becoming universal. Anyone may appreciate the inherent difficulty of coming to another’s aid. Certainly any parent, or teacher, or friend, will appreciate the problem, and even feel a twinge of remorse, for the many Perus they have trampled while trying to be of help. One might be tempted to see Ryan’s poems as a brand of what Harold Bloom has called “wisdom writing,” if they just weren’t so damned funny–and sad.

Ryan’s work can be deadly serious as well, as in this passage from her elegy for the Holocaust-haunted writer W.G. Sebald, entitled “He Lit a Fire with Icicles.”

The final rhyme lends an affecting sweetness to the poem, which doubles, like Auden’s elegy for Yeats, as an apt bit of literary criticism. Such versatility as Ryan displays occurs rarely. Poets often develop a single mode and stick to it; yet, reading Ryan, one has the feeling that, while her lyrics proceed in their signature spindle of highly musical speech, she is constantly searching for new ground.

Her poems are at once modest of means and boldly immodest in scope and in their desire to communicate the high-stakes information of the heart. “Ideal Audience” gets at the nature of this desire:

Ryan’s poems are not written for billboards but for the solitary reader who, against the odds, has come upon her work and been moved by it. That reader, if you are lucky, may even be you.

David Yezzi, poetry editor of the New Criterion, is the author of The Hidden Model.