In “The Edges of Time,” for example, Ryan returns to some of her favorite subjects: the twin states of intention and procrastination, the physical nature of time, and in the last lines a bit of the bleak conservationism which discreetly accompanies many of her images from nature, while making a compact and lucid case and concluding with what feels like the spontaneous brilliancy of epiphany.

        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.

     Ryan’s arguments and inquiries scrutinize, but they are not without the emotional honesty we expect from poetry. Even in her longing, her innate conservationism manifests—she wants things to stay. The poems plead for basic human comforts, such as stability, assurance, moderation, cleanliness, significance, wisdom, and release. As she puts it, “pleading for less, less heat, less stimulation, less company.” “Surfaces” reads: “Surfaces serve/their own purposes,/strive to remain/constant (all lives/want that).”
     In her analysis of Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Ryan attributes the poem’s “perfection” to its trickiness—the “involuntary ha!” that the poem elicits, as though “you’ve witnessed a wonderful magic trick.” The aspect she praises is much like her own work, but so is the aspect of the poem that is resigned—and not lamentably so—to decline. In Frost’s poem, “leaf subsides to leaf”; in Ryan’s poetry, she prays for change to be tempered, fever quelled. Ryan’s work is also compared to that of Emily Dickinson because both poets write compact, elliptical verse that explores ideas and theories through sound and image (and perhaps not coincidentally because both have a reputation for being reclusive women). In addition to these similarities, Dickinson often expresses a kindred longing: “The heart asks pleasure first/And then, excuse from pain—/…/And then, to go to sleep;/And then…/The liberty to die.”
     What I value most, though, is Ryan’s great pity (for herself and everyone else). Without irony, she recognizes that life is hard and that it’s the daily struggles that make it hard—like procrastination or aging—without undermining those struggles or suggesting them insignificant. In “Spiderweb,” a poem with a simple but accurate metaphor, she takes a look at a seemingly small affair from the point of view of the person who’s in the middle of it, beginning, “From other/angles the/fibers look/fragile, but/not from the/spider’s…” The poem comes to the charitable conclusion: “It/isn’t ever/delicate/to live.” Applying the same sympathy to a more devastating circumstance, Ryan wrote “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” about the grief caused not just by the great terrible event of a death, but by every tiny terrible moment after.

        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.

Go ahead; read that one again. Ryan has likened her poems to empty suitcases full of scarves and tiny cars full of clowns: “I want my poems to not have very much in them, but when you start pulling, stuff just keeps coming out.” They bring immense satisfaction to multiple readings.