Delights & Shadows [Hardcover]

The Librarian of Congree named Kooser U.S. Poet Laureate on August 12th for a one-year term beginning in October, 2004. He is a retired life insurance executive who lives on an acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska, northwest of Lincoln. He has published ten books of poetry and won numerous awards including two National Endowment fo the Arts fellowships in poetry, the James Boatwright Prize, the Pushcart prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council and the 2001 Nebraska Book Award for poetry.

This is his latest effort and a perfect example of his talent for writing poetry that is accessible, inviting, familiar and ordinary in a most extraordinary way. There are no tricks, no intentional obscurities, no academic machinatins or clever slights of hand in his work. Instead, what you get is his observation of people, places, and events that make up our everydday life in an ordinary world all done in a way this is frest, illuminating, and ultimately Oh, so familiar. Using what poet Randall Jarrell calls "the dailiness of life," Kooser combines the past and present to remind us of, ultimately, the worthiness of existence.

For example, in the poem"A Winter Morning," Our attention is called to the light in a farmhouse window viewed from the highway that we have all seen in one form or another.

"A farmhouse window far back from the highway

speaks to the darkness in a small, sure voice.

against this stillness, only a kettle's whisper,

and against the starry cold, one small blue ring of flame."

His poem "Necktie" is delightful, implies familiarity that is somehow new and important, and indicative of the wonderful verses throughout the book.

"His hands flutter like birds,

each with a fancy silk ribbon

to weave into their nest,

as he stood at the mirror

dressing for work, waving hello

to himself with both hands."

In all there are fifty-nine poems ranging from his father, mother, casting reels, garage sales, death, memory, a new cap, and a host of commong things and daily events that will remain in your memory, and heart, long after you finish the book...if you ever do.

Kooser is truly a poet of the people. He gives voice to the heartland and is described by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington as "...a major poetic voice for rural and small town America..." whose "...verse reaches beyond his native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways."

A wonderful collection from a poet truly worthy of being U.S. Poet Laureate.

So much is made of Ted Kooser's talent for exposing the extraordinary within the mundane that it is a wonder he hasn't become poetry's equivalent to a typecast Molly Ringwald, fleeing to Paris for a new identity. We hear from Poetry magazine that Kooser "documents . . . daily life"; from a description on his latest book's back cover that he "reveals the remarkable within an otherwise ordinary world" and from his friend Jim Harrison, who remarks on Kooser's "genius" for - surprise! - "making the ordinary sacramental."

Such constant praising of this narrow aspect of Kooser's wider achievement turns it into a kind of shtick, like Philip Levine's factory smoke. It is characteristically American to exploit any decently popular cultural marvel into something so familiar that its most visible representatives grace every cereal box and billboard from Seattle to Key West. I am not betting that Kooser will be the next spokesman for Wheaties - the days of Robinson Jeffers appearing on the cover of Time magazine are long behind us - but I am daring to suggest that there is more to Kooser's work than sacramental mason jars.

Sure, Kooser doesn't exactly help things with titles such as "Cosmetics Department," "A Jar of Buttons" and the exhilarating "A Spiral Notebook" (I wonder what that one's about?) but perhaps he is content with his given status as Hero of the Daily World. That's fine; who wouldn't be? In Delights and Shadows, however, I see more. I see that what Kooser does is less significant than how he does it; that amid such elusive simplicity as these poems command are more complicated emotions, the secret stories of well-lived lives, and a poet behind the scenes who understand exactly what buttons to push to let the reader into them.

Kooser's poems reveal a mastery of gesture and detail that rivals the flawlessness of James Wright's "A Blessing." Simple gestures in poems such as "At the Cancer Clinic" or the gorgeous "Gyroscope" raise the work to a level of sensuousness that is nothing short of hypnotizing. The plainest verbs capture the most vivid and lively scenes. In "At the Cancer Clinic," two women help their sister through the clinic doors, and "Each bends to the weight of an arm / and steps with the straight, tough bearing / of courage." In "Gyroscope," we hear rumors of "the world beyond / the windows slowly tipping forward / into spring."

Even more captivating is Kooser's patient, exact description; how he pauses at every detail to ensure that it is brought to such life as to exist at the edge of the reader's fingertips, as in the description of a painting in "At the County Museum":

Blacker than black, the lacquered horse-drawn hearse,
Dancing with stars from the overhead lights,

Has clattered to a stop, but its waxy panels
Are dusted each morning, as if it might be summoned

Back into harness, to be hauled once again
Through the wake of matched horses, the sweep

Of their tails, its oak spokes soberly walking,
Each placed squarely in front of the next

Along pinstriped rims that carefully unreeled
Hard ruts the wheels could follow home.

Kooser's new book includes many of these museum visits, reports of paintings that are as vibrant as Mary Cassatt's box of pastels, so vivid and precise as to step inside the paintings themselves. Kooser's knack for poems on painting comes full circle in a delicate series of poems called "Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer," poems that occasionally indulge in the irresistible temptation to write poems about writing poems. "Some part of art is the art / of waiting," the speaker reflects in "Sharpshooter," "the chord / behind the tight fence / of a musical staff, / the sonnet shut in a book." The best in the series, "The Veteran in a New Field," underscores what power Kooser commands when he allows verbs to speak for themselves:

His back is turned to us, his white shirt
the brightest thing in the painting.
Old trousers, leather army suspenders.
Before him the red wheat bends,
the sky is cloudless, smokeless, and blue.
Where he has passed, the hot stalks spread
in streaks, like a shell exploding, but that is
behind him. With stiff, bony shoulders
he mows his way into the colors of summer.

For the most part, Kooser's poems are short, tightly wrapped things, as though gushing towards a final reflection from the poem's very first word. Such weight is placed on these concluding observations in which Kooser wraps so many poems that they occasionally buckle under the pressure and risk mawkishness. That a student crawling "out of the froth / of a hangover and onto the sand of the future" is "heavy with hope" seems less certain than the "length of common grocery twine / upon which smoothly spins and leans / one of the smaller worlds we each / at one time learn to master, the last / to balance so lightly in our hands."

An element of believability is lost in these otherwise persuasive poems when Kooser fuses his final lines with so much of the poem's burden. Like most omniscient narrators, the one reporting on the lives of the people and places in these poems imposes on the subject at times: suggestions that an older man whose flabby arm exposes the faded tattoo of former lives has "a heart gone soft and blue with stories," for instance, or "all the shuffling magazines" that "grow still" because the speaker commands "Grace" to fill "the clean mold of this moment" at the cancer clinic.

Yet Kooser's understated style manages to overpower this tendency toward the melodramatic or his adoration of such poeticized words as "shadow" and "dust." Though Kooser overreaches for affect at times, at least he waits until the final few lines that conclude a sustained series of perfectly chosen verbs from his spare lexicon of awe, a vocabulary restrained enough to allow readers the necessary participation. Like Denise Levertov or Nazim Hikmet, there is often a playful sense of wonder at the human experience that sets these poems apart from the more self-conscious work produced by many of his contemporaries.

Even more than Kooser's overexposed talent for rending the miraculous from the mundane is this success at considering something larger than the self or its immediate experiences. Plenty of poets have managed to make poetry out of ordinary things, and while Kooser may be one of the best, what really sets him apart is this ability to look outward with an eye perceptive enough to see where the stories are, like some extraterrestrial assigned to report on earthly life to the inhabitants of another planet.

[...]

I think Kooser's latest book is his best book yet. The poems are concise and written in that plainspoken style Kooser has perfected. And Kooser speaks a poetic language we can all understand. There are five poems that really stand out in the collection. "Tattoo" deals with the fading and aging not just of a man's tatoo, but in a way, of man himself. It's a simply elegant poem. "At the Cancer Clinic" is perhaps the finest poem in the book. Very elegant. Very simple. And wonderful. "A Rainy Morning" compares the operation of a wheelchair with the playing of a piano, which is a fresh and vibrant metaphor, at least in Kooser's hands. "Memory" is atypical of Kooser. It is longer than most of his poems and is one marathon sentence that employs more poetic tricks than one is used to seeing in his poetry. But it suceeds and very well. And finally "Mother" which I think you can only appreciate by reading. Kooser's poems speak (much like his predecessor Billy Collins) to the common reader. That isn't to say that his poems aren't worth rereading. You gain much by revisiting a Kooser poem. He is one of the best writing today.

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