Nationally-acclaimed poets Michael Ryan and Doreen Gildroy will visit campus today to kick off the Fall term's Poetry and Prose Reading series, sponsored by the English Department and the Creative Writing program. Ryan and Gildroy, who are married, have published six collections of poems together. Today's reading will be the first of three scheduled for this term.
Ryan has been the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships. His poems and essays have also been featured in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. Currently, Ryan is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of California, Irvine. Ryan's first book, "Threats Instead of Trees," earned him the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and became a National Book Award finalist in 1974. In 1981, his second collection, "In Winter," was designated a National Poetry Series selection and in 1990 his third book, "God Hunger," won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His much anticipated and most recent collection, "New and Selected Poems," is his first in 15 years and has received the prestigious 2005 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. At $100,000, the award is the largest cash prize awarded for a single book of poetry.
The New York Times Book Review has praised Ryan's work for its evocation of "pain and fear but also surprise, joy, laughter, everything human." Often built around ordinary occurrences in everyday life, his poems are a mix of the humorous and the humbling filled with amusing pop culture references and stark self-awareness.
"Ryan speaks plainly of plain things, and the result is remarkable poetry," the Library Journal wrote. The Journal has also called Ryan "one of the most distinctive poets writing today."
An accomplished essayist as well as a poet, Ryan has won much critical praise for his nonfiction books. His 1995 autobiography, "Secret Life," was named a New York Times Notable Book. More recently, he published a collection of short essays, "A Difficult Grace: On Poets, Poetry, and Writing" in 2000 and a memoir, "Baby B," in 2004. "A Difficult Grace" examines the lives and works of such poetry greats as Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost, blending literary history, the poets' own critical writings, and Ryan's personal insights as a poet himself. "Baby B" was hailed by Booklist as a "frank, funny, and quietly profound" account of Ryan and Gildroy's struggle to have a child together, a theme that dominates much of Gildroy's poetry as well.
Though her career began much later than her husband's, Gildroy has quickly proven herself an exciting new talent in American poetry. Her first book, "The Little Field of Self," is a serial poem made up of many individual page-length lyrics. Her technical skill and the unusual, innovative style of her book quickly garnered her national attention, and Ploughshares, Emerson College's literary journal, awarded her the John C. Zacharis First Book Award in 2002.
Unlike her husband, Gildroy writes most often in short, stark lines, and the subjects of her poems are more abstract. Thematically, the nature of love and devotion inform much of Gildroy's work, as one might surmise from the title of her second book, "Human Love," which was published in 2005. Her poems have also been featured in The American Poetry Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review among others.
Michael Ryan and Doreen Gildroy will read selections of their poetry today in the Wren Room at Sanborn House. The reading will begin at 4 p.m.
