A Look at Michael Ryan’s God Hunger
The opening poem, “Not the End of the World,” begins with a mysterious, instinctive question, “What flew down the chimney/ into the cold wood stove/ in my study? . . . ” Ryan asks what was it that purposely (“flew”) and with luck (because the stove was “cold”) entered his reality. In this opening poem, Ryan documents a vision (that could be much like his vision of god) that is left alone, weak, and dying and then disappearing. His account of the experience is compared with church complete with guardian angels, genuflection, and the Living Host. A masterful poem that arouses the gut fear that “Birds die, we all die,” that we return to the work that is the most that we can do “even though it changes nothing,” and that when that which is fragile and wild dies inside and outside of us, what is left is “a place so desolate” that it can only be named, as Ryan names it, ” a dead planet (3).” These are the words that can be controlled, explained, and understood when nothing else can. These are the poems that look us, the readers, in the eye and say so much. But only so much.
Ryan attempts to find that which he does not know in the poems, that which he does know. The technical aspect of these poems complements the themes contained in them.
The poems are about wanting something more as in the poem “Portrait of a Lady” where an adolescent finds the things that will “answer her anger” and cure the”feeling of gnawing (44).” But her answers are false and are eventually abandoned with age. And it is in this way, using what works for the moment, that which satisfies the hunger, that Ryan sculpts the poems with form and rhyme schemes that are controlled and comfortable. In many of the poems, Ryan supports loose pentameter, often iambic, and frequents the use of an ABAB rhyme scheme like in the poems “Meeting Cheever,” “Through a Crack,” and “Sea Worms.” In this use of form, the reader finds nothing unexpected or chaotic. The poems are physically controlled, regulated allowing the reader to be struck abruptly with the nature of the content instead.
In an ever-changing world, very few things are reliable. But somehow, we all find those things which comfort us. In Ryan’s poem, “A Burglary” we find the collapsing of a man’s world when the habituals, the few things in life that he “needs,” are stolen: a tool with which he works, a typewriter, an item that supplies comfort, recreation, and/or maybe inspiration, a stereo, and “something ludicrously cheap, like a stapler (27).” These things, though easily replaced, were a part of the glue that this life and lifestyle depended upon, tools of trade; The living arrangement where the “symphony on the stereo blended in” where “being alive felt like a gift. It didn’t matter/ where it came from or who or what was the giver (29).” Even in this place of contentment and placidity, there is not the assurance of a true sanctuary.
Everything has limits. Limits are found most abundantly in the lives of men especially in relationships. In “Winter Drought,” “Milk the Mouse,” and “Smoke,” we see examples of the human limitations. A lonely end is brought to an acquaintance, but not after he realizes the “limits of friendship” and that his absence would never be known as part of the “earthly concerns” of friends that eventually make families in “Winter Drought (15).” A Villanelle, “Milk the Mouse” is a recollection of a childhood game played with the narrator’s father. The form fits the poem well, reinforcing both the frequency of this action and the energy of a child. The child-like narrator implies that he understands the purpose of his father’s teasing: “. . . my father speaking// to himself, of course, to the child inside him aching” but because we know the game will reappear during the narrator’s childhood, we see that the attempt by the father to mute his suffering is only temporary, it too has limits.
Most of mans’ attempts to explain and control our lives are limited and what is worse, is that the time in which we have to do it is also limited. In the poem “Smoke,” a specific memory is called up to deliver a certain feeling for the narrator. But in calling it up, he realizes that for a long time, although he does not know to where it went, the memory had left him. Ryan finds that his “life in the world seemed made of smoke” where memory has limits, life has limits, and the relationships that we have in this life with the people who will (hopefully) remember us have also, limits.
Perhaps not everything in life, however, is limited. There is at least one thing that never seems to end in lives of everyday men, in lives of philosophers, and in lives of poets, including Michael Ryan. This limitless thing, this thing which is only limited by the individual who wishes to limit it is the search for that greater and more meaningful than what we know. God hunger. And these poems are delicious.
There are two perfectly beautiful images in this collection that I would like to carry with me everywhere. Images that now, would not leave if I asked them to. From the title poem “God Hunger,” the powerful two lines “I’ll put on the wind like a gown of light linen/ and go be a king in a field of weeds” illustrate the splendid and the forlorn versions that we might expect from death (73). The other image utterly shows the length to which we long for answers. In “A Postcard from Italy,” Ryan shows us the picture of an action that means to him. In describing the beauty that he “can’t tell you” in Italy, Ryan goes on to show us the sight he caught of an old woman dressed in black who was walking in this park: “with her hands clasped behind her neck/ like a prisoner/ just threw back her head to stretch/ her palms towards the sun/ and I wish somehow you could see her (70-71).” But we can see her because somehow we know what that is even though, many times we are too much prisoners of ourselves to do it.
