June 17, 2002
"Just a little bit/ does the magic" writes Kyger halfway into her belated, ecstatic debut on the national stage with a large house. Sharing, with poets such as Philip Whalen and David Meltzer, a love of William Carlos Williams and Zen Buddhism, Kyger patiently and confidently navigates her present-tense diarist lyric as it moves across the page. A Bolinas neighbor of Richard Brautigan, she's capable of hippie dizziness that soars to populist heights: "Everybody
practices magic/ whether they know it or not/ Oh I'm worn out/ just watching the cats/ lick their fur." But where her more beat-influenced colleagues would compensate for their lighter moments with wrenching despair, Kyger opts instead for level-headed surprises: "Man get relaxed/ Woman get permanent." Though formalists may object to her apparent artlessness, Kyger's obsession for detail draws on a passionate intelligence that is seldom trivial. In fact, it's her genius for moment-by-moment description that provokes her to modesty, in opposition to the completist's mania: "But why/ does he want to do that, write down/ all the road signs from here/ to the east coast." While many writers have spoken of their work as one continuous project, Kyger's oeuvre actually holds together in this selection from her 20-plus books; throughout, her prosody, both aural and visual, is pitch perfect.