Watching Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings as a college freshman, I hadn’t known who the winner was between defending heavyweight champion George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in their now-iconic 1974 matchup in Zaire. Then, this March, the BBC announced Foreman’s death at the age of seventy-six, and the world of crackling flashbulbs, Hunter S. Thompson, and prize fighters—the ratings dominance of mixed martial arts notwithstanding—felt as remote as the Cold War. Declan Ryan’s boxing-obsessed Crisis Actor is all the more memorable an entrance for its empathetic reminiscences of a whole cast of working-class individuals lost to substance abuse and targeted acts of violence, if not the usual apostrophized diseases. With a hard-to-predict staccato delivery that will abruptly torque what had already begun on a pained note, as if to guarantee your heart breaks (“Rows of identikit SUVs / line the road in lieu of trees / I’ve seen cut back, then down”), Ryan makes quick work of calcified male ego. Tonally, though, he’s ambidextrous, switching up between a wistful growl absurdly beyond his years and the professional detachment of a small-town historian. His rhythms buzz and mumble like actual talk:
Still a few
pints of porter in the evening, among strangers, mostly,
cabbage and bacon for free on saints’ days. The paper for the
racing
but rarely a punt, the Gold Cup—sure, why not—and watch
it in
the shop. There’s always a nephew somewhere who’ll visit
every few weekends with photos of his kids, leave some
gadget
or other to gather dust.
Some lines are clenched, or jaded from a lifetime of moneyless anonymity; others hang like a dislocated shoulder.
While the poems devoted to boxers tend to focus on heroic bouts and alcoholic downfalls, the moral core of this collection, hinted at in the title, is the crisis of masculinity, belatedly discovered by mainstream media. “What’s the matter with men?” asked New Yorker and Vox articles last year. Ryan’s answer: a lot. If boys don’t cry, surely that goes double for adults. As we head into the middle of the twenty-first century, with feminism’s short fourth wave dissipating in the sea of neopatriarchy, the sweaty world of hand-to-hand combat likely isn’t everybody’s first thought as a vulnerable alternative to the toxic situation in which we find ourselves today. Missing from the far right’s adaptations of Greek thought has been the latter’s tragical understanding of hubris as the lack of feminine equanimity, and for which Jocasta’s suicide ought to give tradwives pause. Indeed, here we’re firmly in the realm of cultural theater. Infowars’ Alex Jones, the bankrupted provocateur, first popularized the idea of crisis actors in the wake of Sandy Hook. (Imagine the disappointment of a handful of conspiracy theorists with Ryan’s book, like the bewildered shepherds who bought John Ruskin’s Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds, a pamphlet about the Church of England.) Though faking hurt has its Jonesian connotation, my money would be on Jake LaMotta’s feigned takedown by Billy Fox in exchange for a shot at the title, immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull as a cornered Robert DeNiro watches the clock. That or the story of how Thompson, flown to Zaire on Rolling Stone’s dime and lavishly advanced to cover the Foreman–Ali fight, sold his tickets and instead floated in a hotel swimming pool full of marijuana after he was rebuffed by Mobutu Sese Seko.
Flanking the anecdotes, the incorporation of outside sources’ words in Crisis Actor tends to be deliciously cryptic as well as audacious. Case in point, Crisis Actor’s knockout stanza is ninety percent quotation. After a page and a half of ringside commentary that would make Norman Mailer proud—Joe Louis versus Primo Carnera, Yankee Stadium, 1935—Ryan weaves:
In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr will write,
“More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern
states
adopted a new method of capital punishment.
Poison gas supplanted the gallows.
In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside
the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers
might hear the words of the dying prisoner.
The first victim was a young Negro.
As the pellet dropped into the container,
and the gas curled upward,
through the microphone came these words:
‘Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me,
Joe Louis . . .’ ”
According to David Margolick, author of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink, the episode King referred to in Why We Can’t Wait about the execution of Allen Foster, an impoverished Black teenager raised in rural Birmingham, is apocryphal: the execution chamber wasn’t miked.
Though it likely made his publishers flinch, Ryan’s modifications of a powerful half-truth and boasting that only seems extempore further mythologize what was already in flux. As opposed to Marianne Moore, whose use of quotation has been compared to the jagged pastework of French papier collé, or Charles Reznikoff’s multi-volume Testimony, drawn from literally gut-wrenching court records, the breaking of printed remarks into enjambed poetry has the potential to remind us of King’s oratory while harkening back to the medium’s beginnings as spoken language, besides affording King’s eloquent prose the rhetorical breadth of a twelve-line stanza in the first place. In the case of Mike Tyson, the virality of the bite-size (to risk a pun) tirade, something sports journalists could trade, is handled as such by Ryan. Take the cri de coeur of a victorious Tyson that “My record will last for immortality. / It will never be broken. / It’s ludicrous these mortals even attempt to enter my realm.” Tyson’s brags were, of course, foolhardy by design, the most memorable of which routinely crop up in the form of motivational posters and internet memes, while Ryan actually splices together remarks from two different fights.
If the bulk of the collection is straightforwardly great, such abrupt changes in register, as with the glimpses of suburban misery (“anywhere but here it might seem possible”) and ruinous futures, can stagger you. Then, relating a bit of family lore—how a donkey accidentally hanged itself in the barn, “acting out the ass of its name” and standing in for a younger Ryan “doughy with leisure”—allows him to smuggle in a truly bruising insinuation about his father’s own redirected, or else suppressed, disappointment:
he knew it could never have been any good
but might through wise rutting have sired an animal
who’d take the toughness out of the day,
carry in its bones all the dormant glory
of that cheap, doomed Abraham
remembered only in spiteful jokes
and the absolute emptiness of a hayshed.
Those spiteful jokes have to do with an act of infanticide mandated by heaven, perhaps with a dig at religion’s embarrassing tricks, its false promises.
No surprise that British Christendom, with its class malaise and generational yo-yoing for austerity, suits good old American pugilism (Ryan, born in Mayo, Ireland, now lives in London). Diego Corrales, the arms of whose Redeemer tattoo “rise and fall as he tenses his back,” resurrects his career with a bloody win. Before his murder in Port Antonio, Jamaica, a retired Trevor Berbick “believ[es] God to be a regular visitor / to his apartment and himself the world champion.” Equally cutting in this book, except without an implied spectatorship, is the tired syntax of a thought spoken directly from the sofa, with recollections of an adolescence spent as both witness and participant, in which one nowhere succeeded another. Plenty of it sounds an awful lot like Les Murray (“And dinner at his for Christmas / now flying’s out of the question”), whose upbringing was at least as severe. Late in Crisis Actor we get a one-time hypodermic of sentiment, a yearning number that begins with Sam Cooke and ends with a supermoon, “the future swinging / whatever light’s still left in its bone lantern.” Twenty-Nine Songs of Despair and a Love Poem, if you like. After all, its motifs are ailing confidants, the idylls we shared in college, and washed-up millionaires. Ryan’s heart, that “pouting lifer” jailed behind his ribs, sees the halcyon days as already past.
Look to Philip Larkin’s lonely Londoners, lifers all, for Ryan’s dominant influence—Mr. Bleaney as sad athlete, stubbing out his fags in a dirty saucer? In the list poems, however, Michael Hofmann is to blame; “LV,” for instance, from One Horse, One Lark, with its recognizable sigh for “the years of the incalculable spreading middle, / the years of speculatively counting down / from an unknown terminus.” Try reading these lines of Ryan’s in Hofmann’s bookish, finch-like voice:
Always being drawn to Bloomsbury, to Fitzrovia,
throwing over dead-end jobs for further study,
an excuse to walk down Charlotte Street or Goodge Street,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
An urge to be part of something to the side
of what was left; a margins fetish, a letting things go by
on purpose, then by mistake; the years of afternoons,
coffees into brandies, somehow always walking in the rain
to Warren Street or Tottenham Court Road, regretting
each step
away from whichever ‘you’, repression as a passion.
Transposed to Paris, you could almost take this for the cranky pensioner in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” demanding top-ups of brandy from a couple of bored waiters and who isn’t ready to head home. That’s the trouble with precocity, not to mention creatively avenging the wrongs of one’s parents: eventually you have to back into unseriousness like it’s a bust in a museum (“Our performances are all overlaid now,” writes Ryan, aping Prospero). Anger is a young man’s game, and every curmudgeon is simply out of touch.
Ryan’s titling is frequently interesting in itself, drawn as it is from psalms or stray dialogue, an Egon Schiele painting or tunes familiar to the pop-rock crowd. The Strokes’ throaty single “Someday” plays as a clique of would-be revolutionaries smoke and chat in a two-floor dive bar called The Castle—the clichéd refrain of youth misspent that Ryan is smart to enclose in quotation marks, the Friday nights of losing at pool and spending the cash one earmarked for beer (“I’m working so I won’t have to try so hard”)—while another poem might pay homage to the calloused hands of Micky Ward or Nick Drake, the Hart Crane of folk guitar who “hung a future on the stopped cogs / of his alarm clock, then slept through it.” Yet this mordancy can also turn as ironically self-critical as Robert Lowell. In a subtle takedown of Ryan’s London-based persona, a group of adult friends has, as if, parachuted themselves into the Mayfly, a restaurant “at the hind-end of the country, [. . .] where people live their whole lives, / most likely.” The name expertly reflects the accusation of rural unworldliness back onto the party, who enjoy the occasional (but, still, too brief) three-day weekend and leave chicken wings half picked. Meanwhile, those hypothetical locals in their long-lived establishment sit around on window stools “watch[ing] this cherry tree convulse into winter, what, seventy times maybe.” That is, for the rest of your life.
_____
Crisis Actor. By Declan Ryan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. 80 pp. $26.00.
