The Best of It, March 1, 2010, Grove Press

Poet Kay Ryan “starts with details, oddities, categories, then unscrews and rebolts them, magnetizes them so that in turn they draw all the bright filings the world throws out. Each of her poems is like a telescope that keeps the observer at a distance while focusing on her subject with disconcerting intimacy.”  (J. D. McClatchy, Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry)

Kay Ryan is our Poet Laureate 2008-2010.

I thought that “The Edges of Time” was apt for the season of Spring, when suddenly we shake off the winter funk and ambitious energy flows once again, “a humming begins.”

“The Edges of Time”

It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things  or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.

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