Vaudeville in the Dark: Poems

"Make no mistake about it. R. M. Ryan's poems are big and baggy, novelistic and comprehensive. They bulge with plunder---some taken from Prague's astronomical clock, some taken from a Chevy Bel-Air four-door back in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, 1963. They strike an arc from `O Careless Love' to Tony the Tiger, from Monet to the last star in the Milky Way, where he's finally let loose the giant voice trapped inside him. One can't help but read this book."---Robert Dana

Vaudeville in the Dark is R. M. Ryan's dance to the music of our times, his search for salvation in poetry. In writing up our minor moments, he reckons to find "peace beneath the unsteady light / where we give outselves to the world / as we circle in and out of the dark." Sometimes funny, sometimes somber, the world of Vaudeville in the Dark ranges from an elegy on the death of a miner in Sago, West Virgina, to a meditation on the life of Rembrandt. Tony the Tiger, Glenn Gould, Chaucer---each has a moment as Ryan makes his way across the stage of our lives. He creates a world both frightening and funny as we---songsters all---long for a "heart dissolved in melody."

"Ryan evokes `the nameless stuff between particles' in this strikingly original new collection of poems, tracking in a clear, concise language that cuts to the bone, the poignancy of lost time, and its ravages. Ryan's poetry both uncovers and creates the connections between the past and this moment, startling us with a quiet, visionary power."---Naomi Wallace

R. M. Ryan, the author of Goldilocks in Later Life and the novel The Golden Rules, is also the lyricist for a northern California rock-and-roll band. He lives on the Sonoma coast of California with the biographer Carol Sklenicka.