Crisis Actor from Faber & Faber July 2023 - order from London Review Bookshop
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 2024) - order link
‘In these riveting and astonishingly sure-footed scenes from the lives of an eclectic cast of doomed boxers, embattled writers, lonely fantasists and inveterate losers of all stripes, Declan Ryan reveals himself as a master of both the telling detail and of narrative suspense. Each exquisitely orchestrated vignette delivers a punch worthy of the heroes of the ring here commemorated. Wry, nimble, heart-wrenching, Ryan’s poems float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.’
Mark Ford
‘Like a poetic Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes, Declan Ryan keeps watch over the drunks and the pugilists, the forlorn emigrants and hopeless romantics, blessing all with his quiet attention and compassion. Elegant and heartaching, these poems illuminate the sorrows of life with a bright flame, returning us to that miraculous human capacity for love and faith even in our darkest days.’
Liz Berry
‘What a pleasure to read this book. Among the so many things that make Crisis Actor extraordinary is how each poem is formally skilled and shrewd and smart, while, at the same time, profoundly packed with emotion. The book is carefully structured: the placement of the brilliant ‘boxer/boxing poems’ in the book is perfect. The book is, for me, essentially, a book of love: love—love’s witness—is at its center. Ryan places himself among the great Irish poets and writers unafraid of sentiment and sensuousness, beauty and love, taking on history, ever-alive in the physical world, melding his traditions as his own, singular in power.’
Lawrence Joseph
‘The poems in Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor are deceptively straightforward—one makes one's way from word to word without feeling lost, but in each poem, sooner or later, one is surprised by a forgotten arm and laid flat. These are muscular poems, athletic poems, but the muscularity and athleticism are those of a dancer or, yes, a boxer, whose ordinary movements—the considered step forward, the quick repositioning of an arm—again and again erupt from the ordinary into beauty.’
Shane McCrae
Reviews:
“In his first trade book, Crisis Actor, the boxing pieces are elegies for noble artists, and the poems on poets and other doomed singers fight reports on sluggers gone under. 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, I would say since Tom Paulin’s A State of Justice (1977): no dead weight, foot-perfect and engaging.”
Michael Hofmann, TLS Books of the Year
“The title poem of Declan Ryan’s first collection, Crisis Actor (Faber & Faber), is an ingeniously-resourced appreciation of the late Ian Hamilton, and the book as a whole brilliantly elaborates and expands the aesthetic of Hamilton’s own poems. Tough but tender, it takes boxing and boxers as its leitmotif, and develops the idea of contest to create a portrait of contemporary life which is haunted by images of violence, defeat, and complicated nostalgia. Ryan’s voice may not be the loudest in the contemporary arena, but it carries an impressively long way.”
Andrew Motion, New Statesman Books of the Year
“Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor offers stiff-lipped, collar-up portraits of boxers, singers, also-rans. Life slipping by. Sentences with no main verb. A bruised heart beneath it all. Terrific.”
Tristram Fane-Saunders, The Telegraph Poetry Books of the Year
“Studded with dispatches from the world of boxing, Ryan’s elegiac laments for the crumbling, shuffling and derelict have a quiet despair: ‘things being no longer ideal; / the heart not in it again after, the turning off, / preferring not to, the not-so-great refusals.’”
Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian Best Poetry Books of 2023
“a persistent melancholic gentleness pervades throughout. His speakers feel more than they can say, and are often critical about what little has been said…Crisis Actor is a lithe debut characterised by these two lines: “They think it’s just the power. / But it’s the accuracy of the power.”
Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Guardian
“Ryan is, it would seem, mindful of the possibility of being a poetic impostor - someone who falsely reacts to other lives, distorts the voices he impersonates, takes on conflicts not his own. A poet as crisis actor. But he proves himself brilliantly equipped to see off the risks of relating other people’s narratives, alongside his own. In poems of serious-minded, clear-sighted, conversational intelligence…The book alternates pleasingly between the pugilistic and the becalmed.”
“Crisis Actor’s title sequence combines verse and interview extracts into a depiction of Ian Hamilton, the Grub Street bohemian who had “repression as a passion” and the type of masculinity that is “very good at being strong on other people’s behalf”. Colin Falck and Hugo Williams, poets associated with Hamilton’s influential poetry journal The Review (1962–72), also appear in the collection – in a finely observed elegiac portrait of Falck and in “Bar Italia”, a nod to Williams’s poems of the same name – and Ryan sometimes seems the Review poet après la lettre…Something analogous happens with the influence of one of Hamilton’s biographical subjects, Robert Lowell. Poems connected to Ryan’s Irish family or portraying his friends are recognizable heirs to the poems of Lowell’s Life Studies (1959)…Yet not only does Ryan treat others’ words with far more probity than Lowell might, he is also far from being a confessional poet. Instead (and this also distinguishes Ryan from many a more recent poet), he is more interested in revealing other selves, other times and places than his own, more drawn to the third person than the first.”
“Boxers fill the Irish poet Declan Ryan’s thought-provoking debut collection, but this is not a violent book…These men must steel themselves before they enter the ring…The tenderness of these lines appears often in Ryan’s portraits of daily life, in pubs and cafes, around pool tables and down Soho streets…With his touching, rueful poems, Ryan says: don’t we all perform our own disasters, again and again?”
Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman
“Ryan’s intensity and power come from the careful compression of the verse. And however compelling his writing about boxing may be, he is really a poet of love. The last piece in the book, Trinity Hospital, is that rare thing these days, a poem of beauty that will speak to people who otherwise know nothing of poets and poetry.”
Graeme Richardson, The Sunday Times
“Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor is 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. Michael Longley and the late Derek Mahon were both substantial poets of Heaney’s generation, but no one ever thought them a fair match for the man himself. Ryan, however, conjures up that extraordinary ghost, though the ghost has him by the scruff of the neck…Ryan’s in love with dashes and semicolons (as, I confess, am I) and is willing to work the edges of a subject until the poem finds itself. He doesn’t milk his endings—he simply arrives there and takes his leave. Many readers may find this work difficult, or not worth the trouble, though as with Heaney it’s layered, sometimes furtive, but almost always in control. Ryan is a champion noticer, especially of the minor lives that form society. Little seems lost on him…His ability to change direction midair, or midstream, may seem overly acrobatic. If that’s the cost of this acute vision, staring at the daily grind through a magnifying glass, it’s a small price. Something tortured has been unleashed here. . . the poems show the power of subtlety and rage. . . . if you finish the book and then immediately have at it again, well, give Declan Ryan a champion’s belt and send him back to training camp for the next match”
William Logan, The New Criterion
“Ryan layers his finely crafted debut collection with precise, nostalgic, and striking poems that probe the past and present. His verse shines in sonically rich descriptions…Ryan complicates a catalog of images with candor…These poems are full of humanity, rewarding insights, and affective phrases.”
“Crisis Actor is a provocative title for London-based Ryan’s subtle, allusive, memorable debut. A crisis actor impersonates real suffering to deceive. As the title for a collection of poems about iconic boxers; elegies for well-known, perhaps not well-enough known, literary figures; littleknown places; and forgotten friends or lovers, it suggests a limit to identification. While undermining memory, the title poem remembers poet, critic, and editor Ian Hamilton, probably best known in the U.S as the biographer of Robert Lowell. If a poet might conceivably be a crisis actor, then the more poignant the evocation of the elegized or memorialized figure, the greater the risk that the poet could betray the unimpeachable integrity of his subject. Not as acerbic as Karen Solie nor as embittered as Michael Hofmann (or Hofmann’s versions of Gottfried Benn), Ryan’s poems are pitched almost too quietly for our hearing, accustomed as we are to memes and shouting. But if, instead of writing of emperors, C. P. Cavafy had written about boxers, he might have sounded like this.”
Michael Autrey, Booklist
“Watching one kind of “sweet science,” boxing, has been good preparation for another kind, poetry. Both are games of angles, requiring energetic movement within severe constraints. Both demand that every action be precise. Both court disaster for a chance at triumph…Time is an obsession in Crisis Actor. In poem after poem, Ryan considers how we experience time, how we speak of it, and how the way we speak of it shapes the way we experience it. “How can you be gone when I still love you?” the speaker asks in “Halcyon Days.” “When I can call out to you in whichever tense / I choose. Come home.” “Halcyon Days” is a love poem of sorts. There are several others in the collection, all excellent. Ryan writes well of romance, how often it gives way to failure and how often that failure opens up to renewed hope. There’s always a comeback, in boxing and in love. It’s all a matter of the tense you choose…Many of the best poems in Crisis Actor have nothing to do with boxing, though they dramatize much that one suspects Ryan learned in part from boxing: the absolute attention to the smallest slivers of time (when it comes to getting up off the mat, the difference between ten and eleven seconds is one of kind, not degree); the regret that comes from the passing of years (“Apparently we’re old enough / for it to mean this won’t happen again / in our lifetime,” he writes in “Promises Had Been Made”); the suffering and exhilaration that come from being an embodied being.”
“Crisis Actor, a debut collection from Irish poet Declan Ryan, offers an unflinching view of life in “the absence of anything like pleasure.” That may sound like something to avoid, but once you enter Ryan’s world of people struggling on — despite monotony, despite loss, despite everything — you won’t be able to forget these quiet witnesses.”
Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“To the extent that simulations help emergency services to be better prepared for such disasters, Ryan’s titular metaphor returns us to the quandary of whether it is possible to prepare ourselves for the crucial moments of life-changing choices. Poetry is attuned to the hypothetical, and poets can be past masters of imaginative moral analysis. The crisis actor, after all, does it to help others, not himself. Ryan’s book focuses on ways in which poetry rehearses life-situations outside life itself, when different futures can indeed be envisaged. Poetry, too, is a kind of play, forever without direct involvement with reality…Ryan is an observant writer, with an eye for accumulating specific details and a way of playing them off against each other in striking verbal contrasts…In his Guardian piece about boxers, Ryan says that his wildest fantasy was ‘that it might be possible for someone to be uniquely equipped to succeed’. On the evidence of his first book it is clear that this dream is by no means fantastical.”
“This is the dialectic at the heart of Ryan’s poetry: how can one reconcile the material facts of a life with the emotional reality of being human…Perhaps the best poems in this collection arise out of the son’s evolving perspective of his father’s life, in which toil and travail are witnessed…And it is this willingness to be open to sentimentality that keeps these poems singing, working hard to unearth a ‘dormant glory’ from the darkest of places”
Tarn MacArthur, Poetry London
“I have not seen anything like these intense, suspenseful narratives in poetry before, which read like condensed sporting commentaries that flare into cautionary myths. They incorporate found material, through the terse, spot-lit words of the various boxers explored, and there is an infectious energy in these taut, forceful, yet often tender, poems: at times, it feels like the fighter’s vigour is transmitted into the poem’s speaker, and then to us …The moral purpose of poetry, Percy Shelley argued in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, is to help us to see the (un)familiar world differently: it ‘awakens and enlarges the mind’, exercising imagination and empathy, helping civilisation, made of individuals, to advance”
Nicola Healey, The London Magazine
“For the most part, the poems of Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor answer rather different needs from those of the average Irish poet’s debut collection…Ryan’s departures are less likely to be Irish genre scenes than flits from briefly-held jobs or tenancies in less fashionable London postcodes…He follows the lead of another Hamilton fan, Michael Hofmann, in building novelistic texture via piled-up descriptions, urban detritus as a force-field against lyric guilelessness…Bertolt Brecht thought plays should be more like boxing matches. It’s certainly one way of cutting through any Arnoldian moping-melancholy…Observing how, in the event of the poet’s demise, no legal procedure would instruct the surviving partner ‘where to stand/in your sleek black mourning dress’ has to be among the more hangdog ways of conceding the possibility of happiness. Crisis Actor is a happy funeral of a book, and a fine debut.”
David Wheatley, Poetry Ireland Review
“It is both felt and devastatingly sad, marking Ryan as potentially one of the most gifted elegists of his generation. His portraits and dedications bringing to mind the later lyric of Seamus Heaney…Ryan’s masculine is as at once effortlessly cool and achingly lost, searching for surrogates among the wreckage of barflies and displaced fathers and finding that, in the end, none of them ever quite matches up to the real thing. This book is the real thing, though. The closest I’ve seen to capturing the contemporary Irish masculine experience in verse. A kind of poetic kintsugi; repairing the cracks in our collective psyche with something akin to pure gold.”
James Conor Patterson, RTÉ Book of the Week
“High points in low lives run throughout a book as interested in bathos as it is in triumph; in the fighters’ hurt bodies and damage, as much as in their myths. You wouldn’t want such subject matter to be dressed in pretty language, and it’s not. Not aggressive poems, they are determinedly narrative, no fuss about them, precious little metaphor or simile…reminiscent of Michael Hofmann’s angular and emotionally efficient early work…This is a first collection intensely aware of how poetry can work linguistic restraint to vivid, energetic ends…Crisis Actor suggests a new poetic voice that will be with us, distinctly and dramatically, for the foreseeable”
Poems - click to read
New Statesman - Five Leaves Left
Times Literary Supplement - i.m. Colin Falck
Poetry - Rope-A-Dope
London Review Bookshop - Bar Italia
