Of Pain and Poetry: A Review of Ricky Ray’s Quiet, Grit, Glory

What does it mean for a poet to write pain, a pet, and the body?

There’s a scene in John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars that has stayed with me through the years—where Hazel Grace, fighting for air, her body burning, in the ER, rates her pain a nine over ten. The nurse, later, said to her,  “You know how I know you’re a fighter? You called a ten a nine.” That strength in the face of a relentless breed of suffering, carried in language that is usually sharp, at times lush, and accessible, is immediately apparent in Ricky Ray’s chapbook Quiet, Grit, Glory. In fact the book opens with a poem titled ‘Pain: 8 on a Scale of 10’, a wonderful opener, a showoff of notable phrases: “the eyes of my eyes” (at once mystical and surreal); “the arguments of the flesh” (reminiscent of Lenrie Peters’s “the tortured remnants of the flesh”).

Ray’s poetry knows the body, the language of its ache, the ache of its language. Illness sharpens attentiveness, it peels open the eyes of our eyes and, beyond that, brightens them, yet to witness that peeling, to encounter the sharpening, is an interesting event. It is a two-way road: the pain that makes alive the senses can also deaden them or flatten their perception, so that no light really enters the cornea, and no music the ears. Though sometimes the sentences ring common, at other times we see the sharpening at work: “To touch soft as a stray petal that lands like luck in my glove.” 

The afore-quoted line, in which what Susan Sontag calls “lexical inevitability” peeps—the varied recurrence of t and s and l gives the feel that the words birth each other—is from the prose poem “Varieties of Service”. What one sees here is a case where the poet gets carried away with dishing out info about themselves that the poem is left alone, and the littered elevated lines seem to be oddlings; the prose poem is hardly ever a good boat for the confessional. Contrasting this with “Somewhere in Indiana”, an immersive prose poem in which images pour into images and song into song, a brimming, pulsing block of language, a kind of embodiment of the earth on the page, but also of the soul, from the poet’s other chap, The Sound of The Earth Singing to Herself—the disparity of the singing is immediately revealed. Here, perhaps, is the averse hand of pain.

Unlike in Sound of the Earth, there are very few poems of what Robert Bly called “twofold consciousness” in Quiet, Grit, Glory; Ray does not let his soul free to go to the trees and come back and ask him questions (paraphrasing Hermann Hesse), and as such there are no answers that, though inconclusive or elusive, satisfy, although sometimes the soul appears to be without the body, as in “The What of Us”, where the tree takes on a consciousness, though as a direct comment on the life of man, and we witness the shifting recurrence of the poet’s thinking: 

The tree reaches toward the light 

until it too falls over 

from too many riches. 

That which lives us 

unselves us, unveils us: 

sweet revelation impales us.

The sounds that come and go and come again in the second half move the idea that—contained within us is all, and that a state of being births another; but the us that closes every line also hints at narcissism.

The most moving poems, and maybe lines, are those in reference to Addie, the poet’s dog. A prose poem titled “Charlie” goes where “Varieties of Service” doesn’t; it is a lesson in watching, beautifully cinematic, sharp in vision. Usually the poet sees in the dog’s being his own life too, which is always intimate to encounter: “Our wills are two countries with their own customs but no clearly defined  border.”; “I rehearse her death in my mind too often./ I’m rehearsing my own death in hers.” Another brilliant poem, also about Addie and several dreams, is “Varieties of Help”; but even here there is cutting pain. Too, I must not forget “Good Men Die”, a dark comic elegy with a touch of surrealism that, though it gives a tipsy feel, is nevertheless heart-rendingly moving:

“Let me buy you ten. I’ll pour them at what used to be 

your mouth and you’ll laugh at the puddle of bourbon 

pooling under your bar-stool, and we’ll speak”

The pain and hurt here (inter alia), I should note, like the poet’s qualifying and requalifying mind, are in a perpetual state of flux. Thus, on a scale of ten, pain deserving of the ultimate score is diminished, because pain itself, by nature, is amorphous in pungency and urgency, constantly changing—always twirling new blades—like a shape-shifting spirit. Ray knows, too, that nothing is ever just itself, that the body, the mind, and the poem are, respectively, communities, constituted in varying degrees: “Many little bodies inhabit each body like a nest.” Quiet, grit, and glory are all part of living—especially with illness present—they cohabit quite nicely, like selves, and play out their part each in its own time. Sometimes they link hands, children in the rain—quiet and grit, for instance—and themselves become something other, say—glory. 

Yet for all the pain, there is humour, striking—“Isn’t your average mutt a mix of six righteous whiskies?” How about beauty, and magic, which he calls the old byproduct of song? By singing his hurt, and welcoming us into his world, his watching, Ray has created for himself and for us a kind of magic, a testimony to hope, to fighting, to grit. In the final poem, “How to Go On”, he tells us, “To go on? It’s easy:/ you open your mouth,/ you take in little sips of light.” Never mind the compelling tautology, the message remains clear. ◇

Quiet, Grit, Glory, 48 pages long, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2020.