Kay Ryan has long been one of my favorite poets—a Pulitzer Prize winning former U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur recipient.  Now she joins my short list of favorite essayists, as well, with these pieces written over the last 30 years and published in Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Speakeasy, the Washington Post and elsewhere, and even some brief pieces unpublished from her personal archive.

I often find myself drawn to the essays written by novelists, short story writers and poets—-the essay form most welcoming as a vehicle for sorting out (from the French ‘to test’ ) the writer’s thoughts and feelings about diverse topics, and this volume is a perfect example of that.  Whether exploring her favorite poets (Frost, Stevens Williams, Brodsky, Bronk, Stevie Smith, and most of all, Philip Larkin who famously said that depression was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth) or noodling about her own writing, library, habits, memory, etc, Ryan is engaging, illuminating, and thoroughly sui generis.

The book is filled with quotable tidbits as well as wonderful poems that she uses as illustrations of her meandering consideration of writing and poetry.  She’s very funny, especially in an essay about attending a huge convention of the Association of Writers and Writers Programs, something she had always avoided and had pledged never to go to.  Narrating her  experience there with hilarity convinced me of her previously good judgement regarding the matter.

Two final essays were among my favorites—one about walking a country road and letting her mind wander to synthesize the litter along the roadside and one about the spaces in her house. From the latter, I loved this: “My bedroom is full of books and as I pass my eye over them on a given morning, one or another of them is somehow just at the right distance from me, just perfect to open and allow that strange unmaking and remaking of the self, that weird interweaving of brains when things go permeable.”  

In another essay entitled ‘Reading Before Breakfast’ she writes that “These are the books I can only open in the morning because only then can I bear them. I go to these writers because they contain the original ichor. They are the potent Drink Me.”  Among those two dozen morning books, she refers to  Nabokov’s ‘Lectures on Literature’ , Kundera’s ‘Testaments Betrayed’, and William Bronk’s (I’ve never heard of this guy!) ‘Vectors and Smoothable Curves’.  How I wish she had listed the others!

Reading this book was like sharing a cup of coffee and a scone with a dear friend, a friend who is much more widely read, discerning, and thoughtful than I and who shares their impressions and conclusions freely.  I’d love to sit with Kay Ryan one day.