Say Uncle Book

I love Kay Ryan's short, terse poems. They are filled with wit and insights that might ordinarily escape our attention. She has a way of taking an old saying or adage and infusing it with new meaning or subverting it to create a new edge for phrases we might tend to gloss over in ordinary conversation.

One of my favorites is "It's Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn"

But how dark
is darkest?
Does it get
jet - or tar -
black; does it
glint and increase
in hardness
or turn viscous?
Are there stages
of darkness
and chips
to match against
its increments,
holding them
up to our blindness,
estimating when
we'll have the
night behind us? (p. 34)

Another, "Why We Must Struggle"

If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what changes costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double, how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need? (p. 54)