lightreads

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

5/5. I have been reading a poem a day from this collection since last August, before my baby was born. (Yes, including the day he was born). I got this idea from a blog post somewhere by a woman who was talking about retiring, and how important it is to have continuity between two very different life states, like a project to carry forward. So I did this, and it was great. Ryan is clever and playful and difficult; her poems offer literary jokes and a sting in the tale.

The idle are shackled
to their oars. The waters
of idleness are borderless
of course and must always
be plied. Relief is foreign
on this wide and featureless
ocean. There are no details:
no shores, no tides, no times
when things lift up and then
subside, no sails or smokestacks,
no gravel gathered up and spit back,
no plangencies, no sea birds startled;
the weather, without the Mathew Arnold.

Poetry, from the middle period of Millay's life. I loved it, but then again I always do with her. I have a marked preference for her sonnets -- the longer
poems are equally beautiful in diction and image, but the repetitive, sing-songy pattern which made Millay famous and which I like very much is something
of a detriment over a hundred lines, pushing the poem down into consciousness so all you actively perceive is the rhythm. But yes, I love the sonnets and
Millay herself, her bravado, her cunning, her brazen sexuality, her wistful view of the human condition.