Elephant Rocks: Poems

By Kay Ryan

The former US Poet Laureate shares “fine poems that inspire us with poetry’s greatest gifts: the music of language and the force of wisdom” (Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize–winning author).
 
Elephant Rocks, Kay Ryan’s third book of verse, shows a virtuoso practitioner at the top of her form. Engaging and secretive, provocative and profound, Ryan’s poems have generated growing excitement with their appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Sometimes gaudily ornamental, sometimes Shaker-plain, here is verse that is compact on the page and expansive in the mind.
 
“Kay Ryan makes it all fresh again with her highly original vision, her elegant, quirky craft. These poems look easy, but the deeper one delves, the more they astonish and astound.” —May Sarton, New York Times–bestselling author of At Eighty-Two
 
“Kay Ryan works toward an exciting art, much less sparse than it looks. This is natural history seen from an angle of vision that Emerson and Dickinson would have approved. It refreshes me to find poems that require and reward rereading as much as these do.” —Harold Bloom, literary critic and author of The Bright Book of Life
 
“The music of these poems is every bit as seductive as their reasoning. Her thinking flaunts the plush, irresistible textures of organic growth . . . Marvelous.” —Boston Review
 
“These poems show a poet who is terribly sly in her reckoning of our world.” —David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems
 
“So original, so astute, so pleasurable are the poems in this book, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they’re still being read long after current critical fashions are dated.” —Poetry

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780802197504

Book preview

Reviews for Elephant Rocks

[abirdman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully spare and deeply-felt lyric poems. Kay Ryan is pure genius. It's amazing to see how much can be done in a half-page poem. The short poems with short lines don't feel compressed, they just feel right. I admire the poet.

[andreablythe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kay Ryan's poems are short, often no loner than then length of a page, and often at first glance they are deceptively simple. The cover such topics as the morning, and island for crustaceans, or time. But despite the seeming simplicity these poems weigh heavy in the mind. They linger. I kept re-reading each poem, hoping to get to the secret meaning that I suspected hid just beneath the surface of the words. Her poetry is lyrical and playful. Rhyme follows no specific pattern, but seems to be thrown in for the pure pleasure of the sound. She gently tease the reader, even when dealing with the serious. A lovely collection of poetry that I will continue to go to again and again.