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Article: Flannery O'Connor once said, ...
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- April 11, 2004
- Author:
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Flannery O'Connor once said, "The writer has to judge himself with
a stranger's eye and a stranger's scrutiny." Michael Ryan brings this
kind of rigorous self-examination and scrutiny to his poems. He
estranges reality and ruthlessly questions himself. His New and
Selected Poems, which has just been published, represents three
decades of work. It gathers together the equivalent of a new volume
of poems with work from three previous collections: Threats Instead
of Trees (1974), In Winter (1981) and God Hunger (1989), which lifted
his poetry to another plane.
A ravenous spiritual appetite drives Ryan's best work, as in the
poem "God Hunger":
When the innumerable accidents of birth --
...