The brilliant and bracing debut collection of poetry from Declan Ryan: a writer, critic, and fierce new literary voice.
Declan Ryan's “Crisis Actor” chronicles various kinds of failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees, a hanged donkey and a bloated rat, solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths, these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash in rueful self-accusation and laconic skepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage, and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightness of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who, in Matthew Arnold's words, "has reached his utmost limits and finds... himself far less than he had imagined himself."
But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous afternoons in pubs cheering for hard-won triumphs. These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach toward grace and redemption.
"One of the finest debuts in recent memory. There have been very few Irish poets in the past half-century who could be compared to Seamus Heaney . . . Ryan, however, conjures up that extraordinary ghost, though the ghost has him by the scruff of the neck."
William Logan, The New Criterion
"Who knew that writing with this degree of care and pain and tact was still possible? For my money it's the best first volume in decades . . . no dead weight, foot-perfect and engaging."
