Ryan’s greatest growth in poetic skill and in the clarification of her poetic intention occurred in the nine years between Strangely Marked Metal and Flamingo Watching, so The Best of It doesn’t offer the breadth to show the extent of it. Reading some of the poems reprinted from Flamingo Watching, however, does let you experience part of the fun and ease of the older poems, which is that there’s less in them. They’re less dense, less like tiny cars filled with clowns, less like hard little diamonds. They are more narrative; they inquisitively describe animals (there is more than one poem about bird watching); they have more words.
     Ryan herself might laugh at how distinct and decided her style has become. Perhaps she already has, in one of the collection’s new poems, “Galápago,” (which may also comment on the lack of new poems for this volume):

        As one reiterates
        oneself day after day,
        it’s not uncommon
        to see nondominant
        traits diminish
        and the self stray
        toward the cartoonish.
        As though the self were
        a straightening Galápago
        where not everything was
        going to stay affordable.
        Say a stylized struggle
        were currently underway
        among the finches
        whereby the few brighten
        while the species vanishes.

Whether that was her intention or not, I don’t know. Ryan is no stranger to reverse-meaning-making. While she facetiously claims to never write about anything that actually happens (and to impatiently litter her poems with fake facts, fake animals, and fake science), she’s often discovered after writing a poem how uncannily it applies to events that hadn’t occurred yet, which she credits to clear writing. “Home to Roost” was sitting on the desk of The New Yorker’s poetry editor on September 11, 2001. It draws an image of the sky darkened by chickens circling before the sun, coming “home to roost.” And these aren’t just any chickens, they’re “the chickens/you let loose.” In this case, Ryan had to ask that the poem be returned and it was later published elsewhere. In others, reverse-meaning-making is a felicitous occurrence. “The Museum of False Starts” vaguely describes a “beautiful but/unfinished” gallery of vanishing thoughts and imagined gardens, and finally:

        […] caught
        in the ancient ash,
        the single spiraling
        horn of an otherwise
        unfashioned animal.

Ryan has of course conjured a unicorn, which she herself only later realized. Then she got to feel the wonder and thrill we feel when we read her poems.

*

     These days, any poet would be unaccustomed to the publicity arising from being appointed the Poet Laureate, but more so Ryan, the self-described “modern hermit.” Kay Ryan’s reputation as a poet was slow to rise in literary circles, partially because when she was writing her first poems (the 1970s) confessional poetry was in and Ryan’s seemed comparatively (and disparagingly) abstract and impersonal. She reciprocated, put off by the self-importance, drama, and exposure that seemed to follow the grossly autobiographical poets of the day.