Kindest Regards: New and Selected - Hardcover

Kooser, Ted

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9781556595332: Kindest Regards: New and Selected

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556595336 ISBN 13: 9781556595332

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2018

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“Kooser . . . must be the most accessible and enjoyable major poet in America. His lines are so clear and simple.” ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated.” ―Library Journal

“Will one day rank alongside of Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams.” ―Minneapolis Tribune

“Kooser’s ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift.” ―The Bloomsbury Review

Four decades of poetry―and a generous selection of new work―make up this extraordinary collection by Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser. Firmly rooted in the landscapes of the Midwest, Kooser’s poetry succeeds in finding the emotional resonances within the ordinary. Kooser’s language of quiet intensity trains itself on the intricacies of human relationships, as well as the animals and objects that make up our days. As Poetry magazine said of his work, “Kooser documents the dignities, habits, and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance.”

From “March 2”:

Patchy clouds and windy.
All morning
our house has been flashing in and out of shade
like a signal, and far across the waves of grass
a neighbor’s house has answered,
offering help.

Ted Kooser is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Delights & Shadows, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States, and is a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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About the Author:

Ted Kooser is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, and he served as the Poet Laureate of the United States (2004-2006). Raised and educated in the Midwest, Kooser worked for most of his life as a life insurance executive in Lincoln, Nebraska. His book Delights & Shadows won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2005. At present, Kooser remains one of the best-selling poets in the U.S., and has an appointment as the Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska where he teaches courses in poetry and nonfiction writing. He continues to be an important spokesperson for poetry through his newspaper column "American Life in Poetry." “American Life in Poetry”. He lives with his wife in Garland, Nebraska.

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it, She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.
The Widow Lester

I was too old to be married,
but nobody told me,
I guess they didn't care enough.
How it had hurt, though, catching bouquets
all those years!
Then I met Ivan, and kept him
and never knew love.
How his feet stunk in the bed sheets!
I could have told him to wash,
but I wanted to hold that stink against him.
The day he dropped dead in the field.
I was watching.
I was hanging up sheets in the yard,
and I finished.
In the Basement of the Goodwill Store

In musty light, in the thin brown air
of damp carpet, doll heads and rust,
beneath long rows of sharp footfalls
like nails in a lid, an old man stands
trying on glasses, lifting each pair
from the box like a glittering fish
and holding it up to the light
of a dirty bulb. Near him. a heap
of enameled pans as white as skulls
looms in the catacomb shadows,
and old toilets with dry red throats
cough up bouquets of curtain rods.

You've seen him somewhere before.
He's wearing the green leisure suit
you threw out with the garbage,
and the Christmas tie you hated,
and the ventilated wingtip shoes
you found in your father's closet
and wore as a joke. And the glasses
that finally fit him, through which
he looks to see you looking back—
two mirrors that flash and dance—
are those through which one day
you too will look down over the years,
when you have grown old and thin
and no longer particular,
and the things you once thought
you were rid of forever
have taken you back in their arms.
Daddy Longlegs

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking along across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.
The Urine Specimen

In the clinic, a sun-bleached shell of stone
on the shore of the city, you enter
the last small chamber, a little closet
chastened with pearl—cool, white, and glistening—
and over the chilly well of the toilet
you trickle your precious sum in a cup.
It's as simple as that. But the heat
of this gold your body's melted and poured out
into a form begins to enthrall you,
warming your hand with your flesh's fevers
in a terrible way. It's like holding
an organ—spleen or fatty pancreas,
a lobe from your foamy brain still steaming
with worry. You know that just outside
a nurse is waiting to cool it into a gel
and slice it onto a microscope slide
for the doctor, who in it will read your future,
wringing his hands. You lift the chalice and toast
the long life of your friend there in the mirror,
who wanly smiles, but does not drink to you.
Epigraph

The quarry road tumbles toward me
out of the early morning darkness,
lustrous with frost, an unrolled bolt
of softly glowing fabric, interwoven
with tiny glass beads on silver thread,
the cloth spilled out and then lovingly
smoothed by my father's hand
as he stands behind his wooden counter
(dark as these fields) at Tilden's Store
so many years ago. "Here," he says smiling,
"you can make something special with this."
February 16

An early morning fog.

In fair weather, the shy past keeps its distance.
Old loves, old regrets, old humiliations
look on from afar. They stand back under the trees.
No one would think to look for them there.

But in fog they come closer. You can feel them
there by the road as you slowly walk past.
Still as fence posts they wait, dark and reproachful,
each stepping forward in turn.
March 2

Patchy clouds and windy.

All morning
our house has been flashing in and out of shade
like a signal, and far across the waves of grass
a neighbor's house has answered,
offering help. If I have to abandon this life,
they tell me they'll pull me across
in a leather harness
clipped to the telephone line.
Walking on Tiptoe

Long ago we quit lifting our heels
like the others—horse, dog, and tiger—
though we thrill to their speed
as they flee. Even the mouse
bearing the great weight of a nugget
of dog food is enviably graceful.
There is little spring to our walk,
we are so burdened with responsibility,
all of the disciplinary actions
that have fallen to us, the punishments,
the killings, and all with our feet
bound stiff in the skins of the conquered.
But sometimes, in the early hours,
we can feel what it must have been like
to be one of them, up on our toes,
stealing past doors where others are sleeping,
and suddenly able to see in the dark.