POEM OF THE WEEK

Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity (2020) is one of the best books about poetry I’ve read: sharp, witty and devoid of pretention. In it, the 75-year-old former US poet laureate gives close readings of her favourite poems – and, almost inadvertently, offers a window into her own work at the same time. In one essay from that collection, she writes admiringly of a very short, very understated Robert Frost poem: “It takes such perfect intuition to know to shut up like this.” For Ryan, Frost shows that “the most exciting thing a poet can do” is “tread the edge of the banal. How close to nothing can he get and stay on the big side of nothing?”

Ryan, too, knows when to shut up. Her tightly coiled poems can get very close to nothing indeed. They’re almost always written in the same form: a short stretch of skeletal free verse lines, plainspoken but leaving much unsaid, with rhymes arriving when you least expect them. As forms go, it’s like the flamingo in an early Ryan poem: “too vivid and peculiar/ a structure to be pretty,/ and flexible to the point/ of oddity”.

And yet the results of that “oddity” can be deeply moving, as this week’s elegiac poem proves. It is full of nothing – absences of absences, the gaps and dents and worn-out spaces that should be there but aren’t. The title is a kind of joke, a serious and painful one: we expect the phrase “things shouldn’t be so hard” to be meant figuratively, not literally.

Ryan taps into an emotional truth about loss: it can seem insensitive, almost cruel, the way that the world carries on seemingly unchanged when someone we love has gone, as if they were never here at all. Tristram Fane Saunders

THINGS SHOULDN’T BE SO HARD

A life should leave deep tracks: ruts where she went out and back to get the mail or move the hose around the yard; where she used to stand before the sink, a worn-out place; beneath her hand the china knobs rubbed down to white pastilles; the switch she used to feel for in the dark almost erased.

Her things should keep her marks.

The passage of a life should show; it should abrade.

And when life stops, a certain space – however small – should be left scarred by the grand and damaging parade. Things shouldn’t be so hard.