Flamingo Watching

Wherever the flamingo goes,
she brings a city's worth
of furbelows. She seems
unnatural by nature -
too vivid and peculiar
a structure to be pretty,
and flexible to the point
of oddity. Perched on
those legs, anything she does
seems like an act. Descending
on her egg or draping her head
along her back, she's
too exact and sinuous
to convince an audience
she's serious. The natural elect,
they think, would be less pink,
less able to relax their necks,
less flamboyant in general.
They privately expect that it's some
poorly jointed bland grey animal
with mitts for hands
whom God protects.

In Odd Blocks Kay Ryan, the acclaimed American poet, presents her work to European readers for the first time. The book includes twenty-one new poems, seven of them first published here. Ryan’s flamboyant imagination sparks in spare and elegant verse. ‘Edges,’ she has said, ‘are the most powerful parts of the poem. The more edges you have the more power you have.’ These poems take by surprise, and increase in resonance.

Cover photograph David Goldes Platonic Solids # 2, 2002. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

Contents

from Flamingo Watching (1994)
Flamingo Watching
This Life
Emptiness
Vacation
No Rest for the Idle
Glass Slippers
When Fishing Fails
So Different
Half a Loaf
Spring
Impersonal
I Marveled at How Generally I Was Aided
Force
Miners’ Canaries
The Hinge of Spring
Deer
Poetry Is a Kind of Money
Masterworks of Ming
Paired Things
Osprey
Turtle
 
from Elephant Rocks (1996)
Living with Stripes
Doubt
Mirage Oases
Chemistry
Dew
Crib
Bestiary
How Birds Sing
If the Moon Happened Once
New Clothes
Crustacean Island
Les Petites Confitures
Why Isn’t It All More Marked
Learning
Age
Counsel
Silence
A Cat/A Future
Hope
Losses
The Cabinet of Curiosities
Her Politeness
Swept Up Whole
Any Morning
Relief
A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water
Distance
Wooden
Heat

from Say Uncle (2000)
Say Uncle
Star Block
Corners
A Hundred Bolts of Satin
The Excluded Animals
Mockingbird
Blandeur
Patience
That Will to Divest
Winter Fear
Grazing Horses
The Fourth Wise Man
Help
The Pieces that Fall to Earth
Don’t Look Back
It’s Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn
Herring
The Silence Islands
Cheshire
Yeses
Crown
Among English Verbs
Lime Light
Why We Must Struggle
Drops in the Bucket
The Job
Failure
Failure 2
Matrigupta
Water under the Bridge
 
from The Niagara River (2005)
The Niagara River
Home to Roost
Carrying a Ladder
Sharks’ Teeth
Weak Forces
The Elephant in the Room
A Ball Rolls on a Point
The Best of It
Shipwreck
The Other Shoe
Atlas
He Lit a Fire with Icicles
Rats’ Tails
Chop
Felix Crow
Desert Reservoirs
Expectations
Ideal Audience
Stardust
Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard
The Past
Reverse Drama
Least Action
Chart
No Names
Thieves
Late Justice
Lighthouse Keeping
Tune

New Poems
Odd Blocks
The Edges of Time
Bait Goat
Train-Track Figure
Virga
Dogleg
Ledge
The Pharaohs
Pentimenti
Bitter Pill
Finish
Easter Island
Spiderweb
Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose
Monk Style
On the Nature of Understanding
The Main Difficulty of Water Wheels
Splitting Ice
Shoot the Moon
More of the Same
The First of Never
 

Index of Titles