God Hunger (Poets, Penguin) - Softcover

Ryan, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140586202 ISBN 13: 9780140586206

Publisher: Puffin, 1990

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Ryan's disarming voice in his third poetry collection (after In Winter and Threats Instead of Trees ) is a quietly intimate one: "I think of myself as dust of bones / mornings when I awake / to find the fine white ash / lining the bottom of my box stove." Revelations like these occur at odd, unexpected moments--as the poet tends a bird that flies down the chimney into his wood stove, or contemplates a newspaper clipping about a prison marriage, or watches Bertolucci's film 1900 , or recalls an incident from his oppressive childhood. There are occasional pieces ("Meeting Cheever," "A Buglary"), a villanelle, free-form verses and metrical quatrains tinged with the wistful irony of W. D. Snodgrass. With almost reportorial detachment, Ryan meditates on a friend's suicide, the Holocaust, severely injured children in a hospice. Nearly all of the poems are marked by the control of a meticulous craftsman seeking transcendent meanings in ordinary events.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

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 "
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Puffin
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0140586202
• ISBN 13: 9780140586206
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 96