Adios, Euro Cup ’12. You weren’t the tournament for me, but, sure, you had your moments. In a once-in-a-lifetime state of affairs, I found myself rooting for Italy yesterday (the Azzurri got to me in the semifinal against Germany, and Balotelli hugging his Jewish mom put me right over the edge). Rooting hard? Not really; it’s not like I’d gone completely bughouse, and I didn’t expect they’d win. Clearly, they proved no match for Spain, who played with indisputable brilliance and class in the final. Plenty of writers are spilling buckets of ink over the questions of whether the current Spanish squad can be called a dynasty; is the greatest team of all time; deserves or does not deserve to be deemed boring. I’ve little to add to the discussion, and already look ahead to Brazil ’14, where, and when, I hope my beloved-but-currently-high-on-my-shitlist KNVB will pull it together and make me proud to have doubled vowels in my last name once again.

So it’s now that slow, quiet, fallow season between a major competition and the beginning of the Premier League season. I’m pleased that Gareth Bale has renewed his contract with Tottenham, if chronically fretful about the fate of Luka Modric, and, like the great Benoît Assou-Ekotto himself, I anxiously await the announcement of a new manager for the team. Any. Minute. Now.

It also means that I can turn my attention to other matters. Namely, poetry. Stephen Burt wrote an interesting piece in The Guardian about Kay Ryan, the American poet chosen to compete in the “Poetry Parnassus,” the U.K.’s largest poetry competition ever. Burt’s essay begins:

Kay Ryan‘s poetry, and her public – if you can call it that – persona defy almost every stereotype that a reader outside the United States might bring to an American poem. Ryan’s poems are witty, reserved, unprepossessing, impersonal, small-scale, as well as short-lined, practical rather than spiritual, never boastful.

I’d say his assessment of Ryan’s style is on the money. I’m less sure that the opposites of these traits are what, broadly speaking, characterize many other contemporary American poets, or contribute to my frequent resistance to their output. Further along, Burt gets a little closer to what might be at the heart of my problem:

Humility and restraint, respect for silence, remain as important to her work as its disillusioned wit.

So does access: her poems almost never require you to know other literature beforehand, though they can reward those who do.

One of the extraordinary things about Kay Ryan’s poems is that they manage to dazzle without being flashy, despite her ingenious wordplay. I never get the sense that she’s madly enamored of her own production, or trying to impress anyone with her knowledge or brilliance. They’re there, certainly, but with the restraint Burt observes; Ryan’s clear, surprising language lets the poems do their emotional job on their readers. (And, yes, I believe that poems do have emotional jobs to do).

When I think of living poets I admire, some of my fellow Americans are on my list: Anne Winters, Gerald Stern, and Jill McDonough among them. But more often than not, the first names on my lips belong to British and Irish poets: Ciaran Carson. Don Paterson. Simon Armitage. Robin Robertson.

It’s a foolhardy task to try to define a national poetics, if there even is such a thing. Still, I wonder why my preferences in poetry tend to tilt across the Atlantic.

Something that connects all the living poets I love, American and Irish and British, each very different from the next, is that their poems, the ones that get to me, never feel too labored over, over-worked, workshopped like crazy. Writing good poems isn’t easy (I keep trying), and, more often than not, plenty of work goes into their making. I just don’t want it to show so much; I often feel that, in contemporary American poetry, it does. And  my favorite poets are as adept at looking outward as they are at looking inward; they have an expansive field of vision allows them to do both at once.