Although our current U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan’s work is chiseled and granite-like – far from “confessional” or sentimental – this interview abounds with heartfelt personal details.

Ryan talks about how, while she was biking across the country in 1976, she heard a disembodied voice answer her silent question about becoming a poet with “Do you like it?” She talks about her father, a dreamer, who died prematurely while he was away from home, reading a get-rich-quick book at a motel. Most poignantly, she talks about how her “life partner” Carol died earlier this year, happy about Ryan’s accepting the poet laureateship partly because it offset the horror of her own death by cancer.

Then, too, Ryan muses about the ups and downs of her career, which was slow to take off; this will give hope to many aspiring poets listening to her success story. Her first book, supported by a group of Carol’s friends who got together and anteed up funds, was self-published. Ryan was no less than 50 years old when her first poem was published in “The New Yorker.” She was lying in bed reading the papers one Sunday morning when Carol pointed out one of Ryan’s poems quoted in “Boondocks” in the funnies – at which point Ryan felt as though she’d really “arrived” as a writer.

Everything that I’ve read by Ryan that has struck me as flinty and cold on the page gives way in this terrific interview from the long-standing topnotch Kansas City series, “New Letters on the Air.” Ryan ends up sounding like my image of Emily Dickinson on a fine Amherst morning.

She’s as warm as toast.