he late May Sarton said of Kay Ryan's writing that she "makes it all fresh again with her highly original vision, her elegant, quirky craft." Anyone who reads Flamingo Watching will come to see why Ryan's work deserves such praise and why that praise came from one of our most respected women poets.

An attractively produced book, Flamingo Watching is set in handsome New Baskerville and is printed on quality, cream-colored paper. It is comprised of three parts: "Habitat and Range", 'Behavior", and "Common Names", tidy (if a bit too manifest) headings, like those found in ornithological encyclopedias. Ryan's poems are exceptional, the preponderance of them short and succinct: "I see the yellow maculations spread/across bleak hills of what I said/ I'd always think; a stippling of white/ upon the grey; a pink the shade/ of what I said I'd never say." All spoken in a voice as singular as the words it speaks about spring.

It should come as no surprise that Californian Ryan, who teaches writing at the College of Marin, has placed poetry in a long list of topnotch publications, among them American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The Formalist. One wonders--although many of Ryan's poems in this book, use nature metaphorically or as a point of departure, most of them are landscapes of texture the likes of which could easily have found their way into the best ecological and conservancy magazines, The Amicus Journal, Green Fuse, Wilderness and yes, Snowy Egret.

Poems from all schools lend themselves quite amicably to excerption. Ryan's do not. One has to have the whole poem in order to hear and to see what extraordinary things she does with language and timing. She writes affectionately and from the freshest of viewpoints about deer, snake, osprey, turtle, rabbit, canary and her flamingo, displaying sentiment without sentimentality. Ryan's sly internal slant and near rhymes hint at playfulness.

Sometimes the poems seem lighthearted when they are as serious as the flamingo of her title poem: "She seems/ unnatural by nature--/ too vivid and peculiar/ a structure to be pretty,/ and flexible to the point/ of oddity."

A grand connection between this earth and the human spirit is exhibited in Ryan's work. Alliterative phrasings imbue these poems with musicality: "this lean, this slight/ slant,", "a three-inch inspiration", "The whole loaf's loft". Surprise leaps up from the poems where syntax is everything, and leaps so naturally as to imply that the words have been merely tossed together. These are pink poems. They perch. They drape. They preen. They incubate. They stretch their facile necks. And we can do no less than admire. Nature-inspired and non-judgmental, Ryan knocks at the door of the environment; if in a lopsided manner, the link between humankind and the ecology is there especially when we look at "Emptiness":

Emptiness cannot be
compressed. Nor can it
fight abuse. Nor is there
an endless West hosting
elk, antelope, and the
tough cayuse. This is
true also of the mind:
it can get used.<