Some critics still suggest that “over time the author seems to be disappearing from [Ryan’s poems]. They seem to be growing more abstract; there’s less of a personal voice.” But insofar as the poems have become more and more stylistically unique, they have become more personal. They chronicle a particular mind’s inner life, and in a world often defined by identity politics and social networking, it’s refreshing to be given the opportunity to put the outer self aside. In “Impersonal,” an earlier poem, Ryan addresses this bluntly:

        The working Kabbalist
        resists the lure of
        the personal. She
        suspends interest
        in the Biblical list
        of interdicted shell fish,
        say, in order to
        read the text another way.
        […]
        it might easily seem
        comical, how she
        ignores an obviously
        erotic tale except for
        every third word,
        rising for her like braille
        for something vivid
        as only the impersonal
        can be—a crescent
        bright as the moon,
        a glimpse of a symmetry,
        a message so vast
        in its passage that
        she must be utterly open
        to an alien idea of person.

In her more recent poems she does nearly abandon both the “I” and the “she” of the pseudo-character, and instead goes directly for the universal “we” of our shared experience. She says she doesn’t write about her own experiences; I think instead she is writing about all of our experiences—what any one of us might think had we considered the spider web or the green hills or our own “stacks of put-off things.” Again, her sympathy is generous, and her plea is not to but for all of us. This new anthology could have been named for its fifth poem: “We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It,” the title of which gives us a sense of the direction in which Ryan’s sensibilities are embarking.
     Speaking of all of us, she writes, “We are alone, and poems make us more alone,” in her one-page introduction to Poem in Your Pocket (2009), an anthology of poems bound like a prescription pad or daily calendar. But she means it in the good way:

Alone in the sense of experiencing inside yourself a cascading series of exquisite discriminations and connections which leave you in the fullest possible possession of your self while simultaneously providing the most intimate escape from self…. And strangely enough, it is during the private murmured conversation between the poem and the reader, both agreeing that the world cannot be known or contacted, that it is.

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