Crisis Actor

Declan Ryan

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571371280
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

'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

'Declan Ryan reveals himself 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.' Mark Ford


Crisis Actor chronicles various failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees; a hanged donkey, a bloated rat; solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths - these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash with rueful self-accusation and laconic scepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightest of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who - in Matthew Arnold's words - 'has reached his utmost limits and finds . . . himself far less than he had imagined himself'.

But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous pub afternoons, cheering on and hard-won triumphs. These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach towards grace and redemption.

Table of contents

• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Sidney Road
• Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands
• The Range
• Fathers and Sons
• The Donkey
• Mayfly
• The Resurrection of Diego ‘Chico’ Corrales
• Five Leaves Left
• Bachelors
• From Alun Lewis
• I’m Working So I Won’t Have to Try So Hard
• Blind Cassius and the Bear
• Crisis Actor
• Bar Italia
• My Son, the Heart of My Life
• Colin Falck
• The Young God of the Catskills I
• Seated Nude Girl with Pigtails (1910)
• Pretty Boy Blues
• The Young God of the Catskills II
• The Rat
• Keats Parade
• Rope-a-Dope
• It’s a Long Way Back from Nowhere
• Jehovah and the River
• Promises Had Been Made
• Halcyon Days
• Thunder
• Jonathan Rendall
• Trinity Hospital
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright