Michael Ryan Selected Works

Guy Novel marries a thriller to a shameless love story and fun ride, what Graham Greene might have called "an entertainment." It takes place over one month in 1996, from early August to early September, as the Taliban were about to take over Afghanistan, Bill Clinton was running for re-election, most people still used answering machines, and HotMail became the latest new thing.

The story is told retrospectively but vividly by Robert Wilder, a less-than-successful LA comic who creates big problems for himself by picking up a gorgeous bank clerk on the afternoon of his wedding. These problems have the happy resolution of the conventional plot of comedy: boy meets girl, boy loses girl (twice), boy gets girl (and vice-versa), but there are lots of turns along the way and lots of jokes and lots of play with the gendered conventions of Romance. The political and historical moment enters with a vengeance halfway through the story, and spirits our he-roes to places as different as a five-star Paris hotel, Clinton's White House, and a yurt in Turkmenistan, while Robert learns something about loving another person for exactly who she is.

Not an easy lesson to learn—for him or for any of us—but the medicine goes down effortlessly with the clarity and grace and laugh-out-loud humor of Michael Ryan's widely-circulated, wildly-celebrated writing.

“[In] preliterate societies, even those as late as ancient Greece and Anglo-Saxon England, the poet is the ideologue, historian, theologian, philosopher, TV, newspaper, Internet, and megamultiplex cinema rolled into one”—so begins Michael Ryan’s lively description of the cultural context of ancient poetry, in pointed contrast to that of poetry now. Informed by his own experience as a poet and writer, A Difficult Grace examines the lives and works of Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Whitman, Frost, Bishop, and Stevens (as well as other poets and writers before and since), deftly combining literary history, critical writing by the writers themselves, and Ryan's expert understanding of their work. The result is a collection of powerfully argued essays written in a style easily accessible to a wide range of readers. Attending to the difficult graces of form, structure, rhythm, and technique, Ryan illuminates the unifying subject of his book: the vocation of the poet and the writer in the contemporary world. This is an essential book for both writers and readers.

Baby B is an embryo—one of four that have been implanted into Michael Ryan's wife, Doreen. Their story is told from the rarely voiced perspective of the hoping-to-be father. As they face the prospect of failure one day and of quadruplets another, the couple must endure an emotional roller coaster of fear, exhaustion, and self-doubt. With candor and humor, Ryan chronicles an adventure and a love story: a strange and awe-inspiring medical process that, if everything goes just right, results in human life.

Originally published as an essay in The New Yorker.

"Ryan speaks plainly of plain things, and the result is remarkable poetry. Avoiding agenda, he uses colloquial language bent slightly to his needs—'he saw that this was the way / they could no longer talk together''—to discover the particular resonance of each event, whether bicycling, freeing a bird from a chimney, or reflecting on a burglary. The discovery is often delivered with a punch at poem's end. Thus, losing his contacts when swimming 'to get skinny,' the poet is reminded of a 'friend diving at dusk / in that mountain lake for his daughter / and what came to him when his hands / sank into the cold mud at the bottom.' Occasionally, the punch is not so decisive, but most of the time Ryan is remarkably on target. A fresh new collection from one of the most distinctive poets writing today." —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

The acclaimed author's 2nd collection of poems; selected for the National Poetry series.

Michael Ryan’s first collection in fifteen years shows the acclaimed poet at the height of his powers. Highlighting the wit and passion displayed throughout his career, Ryan’s latest work comprises fifty-seven poems from three award-winning volumes and thirty-one new poems. In both dramatic lyrics and complex narratives, Ryan renders the world with startling clarity, freshness, and intimacy. New and Selected Poems is filled with the stuff of everyday life, and as The New York Times Book Review said, it “include[s] pain and fear but also surprise, joy, laughter, everything human.”

At the age of five, Michael Ryan was molested by a neighbor. Nearly 40 years later, he found himself methodically preparing to seduce a girl who was barely more than a child. As Ryan describes his free fall into sexual obsession, he creates an autobiography that is at once harrowing and redemptive, heartbreaking and profoundly moral. "By turns repelling and seductive . . . absorbing and disquieting." —The New York Times Book Review.

“The twin ancient powers of poetry are story and song,” Michael Ryan said in a recent interview. “I like a lot of both.”

And both are here in This Morning in glorious abundance: graceful complex narratives and tight formal lyrics, edgy humor, affecting music, and insistent clarity always in the service of the heart. He can be deeply funny and extremely moving, often at the same time. No other living poet possesses Ryan’s range of tone and technique in rendering the great subjects of art and life: sex, mortality, loss, and love (both conjugal and paternal). Even his most apparently autobiographical writing penetrates to the universal subject within it. Like Dickinson in her poetry, his personal life interests him primarily as an instance of human life. His artistic discipline is thus a spiritual discipline, and the vital spirit infusing these poems rises from the depths of isolation transformed by the joy of loving other people persistently and generously. This Morning is the work of a contemporary American master.

Line after line from Threats Instead of Trees, the 1974 collection that won Ryan the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, suggests a harrowed soul: ''I'm speaking again / as the invalid in a dark room,'' ''I'm afraid of marriage,'' ''So close you're defenseless, / you inhale your father's last breath,'' and so on. As in a horror movie, it's as though the speakers in these poems were shot in extreme close-up so that we can't see the threat just outside the frame. Threats Instead of Trees contains many poems of this kind, ones that recall the anxious utterances of Anne Sexton and the early Mark Strand, as well as a number of more open, discursive poems that look ahead to the narrative experiments of the 80's and beyond . . .

Freud said that love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness. But love by itself comes up short in Ryan's poetry, and work is a subject he doesn't discuss. Poems make life bearable here, especially big long talky poems that include pain and fear but also surprise, joy, laughter, everything human.