Saturday 9 August 2014

Kay Ryan: Doing it again

I've remarked before on Kay Ryan's extraordinary ability to condense a world of meaning - of truth indeed - into a few short, simple lines and images. Here she is, doing it again, in a poem I came across last night while browsing in The Best of It:

Learning

Whatever must be learned
is always at the bottom,
as with the law of drawers
and the necessary item.
It isn't pleasant,
whatever they tell children,
to turn out on the floor
the folded things in them.

What weight that word 'folded' (the only long 'o' sound in the poem) carries - and those 'folded things'...

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