Light Water Light Water Light Water Light

This is a beautifully American book, as heartbreakingly accommodating as Ellis Island, and we mix around with Jonathan Edwards, Yeats, Bob Marley, Henry Miller, Cat Stevens, da Vinci, Bob Dylan and Basho, not to mention the street-weary spooks and hustlers of our national anonymity-a great, broken population for which, from the lofty to the funky, Ryan gives soulful, saxophoneful voice. -- Albert Goldbarth

What if all time were present, if that were the ultimate gift of consciousness: to know it and to walk among its phantasms, fears, constructs, contentions, and wild inscrutable junk? Who would even dare to imagine such a result for the human project? William Ryan, that’s who, and he has done it in this magnificent and sinuous sequences in which the poems grow from fourteen line sonnets to sixteen line sonnets and culminate in a Coda of over 300 lines. It is a monumental work of the imagination, all of it delivered in a language of dark and surreal speed that teaches a whole new form of thoughtfulness.