Delights & Shadows - Softcover

Kooser, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556592019 ISBN 13: 9781556592010

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2004

Synopsis

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Ted Kooser, who served as United States Poet Laureate (2004 2006), is a poet who works toward clarity and accessibility, so that each distinctive poem appears to be as fresh and bright and spontaneous as a good watercolor painting. He is a haiku-like imagist who imbues his poems with "tender wisdom,” and draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life.

Praise for Delights and Shadows:

"Ted Kooser...has a genius for making the ordinary sacred." The New York Times

"A sense of wonder and compassion runs through this Pulitzer Prize winning volume Kooser's poetry is understated yet manages to skillfully illuminate the small moments of life." Christian Science Monitor

"[Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes that way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can't help but feel significant truths behind his lines." The Philadelphia Inquirer

"There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, Delights & Shadows. Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms." Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post

"Delights and Shadows is a book with a deep stillness at its center, perfectly self-contained." Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times

"Kooser's ninth collection of poems reflects the simple and remarkable things of everyday life. That he often sees things we do not would be delight enough, but more amazing is exactly what he sees. Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated .Highly recommended." Library Journal

"Few poets depict the Midwest so accurately or with such tender regard... Kooser excels at the brief, imagistic poem." The Kansas City Star

"Delights and Shadows raises the voice of the poet above everything else. Each short, vivid poem on the page reads as if it were being spoken aloud. Details about cemeteries, dictionaries, a doctor's waiting room, and a jar of buttons bristle with sound and awareness. Kooser's ability to use brief lyrics to compose a music of discovery and regeneration makes his work radiant and consuming... This is not an extended, complex or experimental kind of writing, but poetry that rings true, allowing the human sound of being to exist on the page." Bloomsbury Review

"Here is the gift and fragility of life." The Wichita Eagle

"Kooser is a master of the subjective description. Empathetic without sentimentality, his eye ranges over all sorts of everyday subjects and finds material everywhere wherever the unpredictable particularity of the world can be glimpsed Perhaps Kooser’s success lies in his determination to see the things of this world with such clarity and passion that their underlying mysteries, delights, and shadows also become clear, if only for a moment." The Georgia Review

"You can almost see Kooser behind the poems, watching the world like a sketch artist Kooser displays the same kind of fluid strokes Degas used in his ballet pictures...He is an exquisite miniaturist of daily life." The Hartford Courant

"The poet finds magic in activities and objects typically considered mundane... Metaphors are the treasure of these short, imagistic poems, emphasizing the wonder and delight latent in what is often merely taken for granted." Harvard Review

"Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation." Dana Gioia

"Kooser is straightforward, possesses an American essence, is humble, gritty, ironic and has a gift for detail and a deceptive simplicity." Seattle Post-Intelligencer

As Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser launched the weekly poetry column "American Life in Poetry," which appears in over 100 newspapers nationwide. He is the author of ten books of poems, including the collaboration with Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (isbn 9781556591877).

About this title

About the Author:

As Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser launched the weekly poetry column "American Life in Poetry," which appears in over 100 newspapers nationwide. He is the author of ten books of poems, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Delights & Shadows. He lives in Nebraska.

From The Washington Post:

A Winter Morning
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.

Ted Kooser

The appointment of Ted Kooser as the nation's new poet laureate puts me in mind of other poets from Nebraska who have meant a good deal to me: Willa Cather (1873-1947), John Neihardt (1881-1973), Weldon Kees (1914-1955) and Loren Eiseley (1907-1977).

Something about the Great Plains seems to foster a plain, homemade style, a sturdy forthrightness with hidden depths, a hard-won clarity chastened by experience. It is an unadorned, pragmatic, quintessentially American poetry of empty places, of farmland and low-slung cities. The open spaces stimulate and challenge people. One's mettle is tested. Cather said that coming to Nebraska was like being "thrown onto a land as bare as a piece of sheet iron."

The poets from Nebraska tend to have a reticent manner and a determinedly accessible style, a sensitivity to the natural world that at times reminds me of the Chinese poets. This is a modest, stubborn kind of poetry that owes a great debt to the native American sensibility. Seasons rotate and weather matters. Natural disasters are real. The visible world informs the verbal one. Yet there are also spiritual presences. The seemingly ordinary world turns out to be extraordinary. If you can learn to read the signs, every landscape has a genuine story to tell. Here is Eiseley's poem "Prairie Spring," which shows something of his gift as a literary naturalist:

Killdeer screaming over the flowing acres
of bronze grass now the buffalo are gone
make a wide eery silence. In the midst of crying
April has come but meadow flowers alone
spring up to greet her. No more the hooves will thunder
of bison moving northward in the spring.
No more the violet by wet black muzzles
will be cropped under -- a long silence follows
after the flashing and exultant wing.

There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, a book of portraits and landscapes, Delights & Shadows. Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms. The book begins with a poem called "Walking on Tiptoe" and ends with one entitled "A Happy Birthday." It takes an epigraph from Emily Dickinson -- "The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can" -- but just as easily could have taken one from Wallace Stevens: "Death is the mother of beauty." Mortality is omnipresent and induces a deep attentiveness. Everyone here -- a young woman in a wheelchair, a skater dressed in black, a group of mourners after a funeral, the poet himself -- seems to be moving lightly over an invisible abyss. "There are days when the fear of death/ is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates/ everything," he writes in "Surviving." "Were it not for the way you taught me to look/ at the world, to see the life at play in everything," he writes to his mother who has been dead just one month, "I would have to be lonely forever."

A Happy BirthdayThis evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

By Edward Hirsch
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1556592019
• ISBN 13: 9781556592010
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96