How about a thread where we can review or chat about the books we're reading, just finished, or are about to start? A place to share what we're doing, not what we've long ago done: a log more than a resume. So come join in, write a review when you feel like it, shoot the breeze lightly or ponder burdensomely while sharing the books, authors, and thoughts you're discovering. It doesn't have to be about poetry, but if you can link your new endeavors to your poetic spirit, a bonus is always nice, right?
I'll start.
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Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser
In 2004, Ted Kooser was appointed as U.S. Poet Laureate. That year he also came out with the poetry collection, "Delights and Shadows." The next year he won the Pulitzer Prize for it and was reappointed Poet Laureate for a second year-long term.
I came to "Delights and Shadows" after first greatly enjoying two of Kooser's other books, "The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets" and "Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems." Both were surprises, straightforward in style yet seriously considered and artfully imaginative. They inspired me to find out what all this Pulitzer and Laureate business was about.
For me Delights and Shadows turned out to be about how naturally a lack of adornment can let a vigorous metaphoric imagination do its work. But to put things more in the plainspeak of the Iowa plains communities Kooser descends from and is said to be characteristic of, let's get away from the meta of it all: Kooser writes of quite ordinary people and moments. No gyres widen; nothing out of animus mundi slouches toward Bethlehem.
Some of those moments are slight enough -- tying a tie, a biker taking off from a stoplight -- that a poem quickly rises above its concrete particulars to embrace the pleasures of precise, transformative attention.
Delights and Shadows retains its delight in crystallizing observation into metaphor throughout the four sections it travels deeper into the realm of shadow. Family members die and eternity takes a place at the table. Memory, bouyant, slips unnoticed under the waves to drown. Yet here in this excerpt from A Washing of Hands is the boy's energy still seeping through the man:
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P.S.: During his tenure as Poet Laureate, Kooser began a free weekly poetry column for newspapers, featuring a wide selection of modern poets. There are over 300 now at American Life in Poetry.
P.P.S.: AW's own poets Brandt (Researching Odonata) and Steppe (Iris Unguicularis), among others, have crafted poets about plants and animals using their names as titles. Kooser did a wonderful poem of that sort called Lobocraspis griseifusa, about a moth that survives by drinking from the tear ducts of sleepers.
I'll start.
______________________________________________
Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser
In 2004, Ted Kooser was appointed as U.S. Poet Laureate. That year he also came out with the poetry collection, "Delights and Shadows." The next year he won the Pulitzer Prize for it and was reappointed Poet Laureate for a second year-long term.
I came to "Delights and Shadows" after first greatly enjoying two of Kooser's other books, "The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets" and "Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems." Both were surprises, straightforward in style yet seriously considered and artfully imaginative. They inspired me to find out what all this Pulitzer and Laureate business was about.
For me Delights and Shadows turned out to be about how naturally a lack of adornment can let a vigorous metaphoric imagination do its work. But to put things more in the plainspeak of the Iowa plains communities Kooser descends from and is said to be characteristic of, let's get away from the meta of it all: Kooser writes of quite ordinary people and moments. No gyres widen; nothing out of animus mundi slouches toward Bethlehem.
Some of those moments are slight enough -- tying a tie, a biker taking off from a stoplight -- that a poem quickly rises above its concrete particulars to embrace the pleasures of precise, transformative attention.
Kooser is involved here with world-creation in a way that reminds me of Wallace Stevens' insistence on the supremacy of the imagination as a tool for comprehending and bringing the world into order. Stevens conjured poetry out of men crossing a bridge or a jar on the ground, things so absent of event as to almost disappear until a focused poetic mind coaxed magic from them as if by sheer chutzpah. Kooser, too, so skillfully creates art from dust that his poems often leave me with a sense of glee at their unassuming audacity.The Necktie
His hands fluttered 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.
Delights and Shadows retains its delight in crystallizing observation into metaphor throughout the four sections it travels deeper into the realm of shadow. Family members die and eternity takes a place at the table. Memory, bouyant, slips unnoticed under the waves to drown. Yet here in this excerpt from A Washing of Hands is the boy's energy still seeping through the man:
and from That was I, a final stanza in which the narrator asserts a dark and witty refusal to be diminished:She turned on the tap and a silver braid
unraveled over her fingers.
She cupped them, weighing that tassel,
first in one hand, then the other,
then pinched through the threads
as if searching for something
Kooser provides a pleasing mix of larger and smaller pleasures in Delights and Shadows, as well as a bit of suspense. Called "one of the best makers of metaphor alive in the country," he has built a collection of poems with so many figurative accomplishments that one begins to suspect each new line might harbor a marvel. It often will, and in language so clear and accessible its song is all the more marvelous.And that was I you spotted that evening
just before dark, in a weedy cemetery
west of Staplehurst, down on one knee
as if trying to make out the name on a stone,
some lonely old man, you thought, come there
to pity himself in the reliable sadness
of grass among graves, but that was not so.
Instead I had found in its perfect web
a handsome black and yellow spider
pumping its legs to try to shake my footing
as if I were a gift, an enormous moth
that it could snare and eat. Yes, that was I.
______________________
P.S.: During his tenure as Poet Laureate, Kooser began a free weekly poetry column for newspapers, featuring a wide selection of modern poets. There are over 300 now at American Life in Poetry.
P.P.S.: AW's own poets Brandt (Researching Odonata) and Steppe (Iris Unguicularis), among others, have crafted poets about plants and animals using their names as titles. Kooser did a wonderful poem of that sort called Lobocraspis griseifusa, about a moth that survives by drinking from the tear ducts of sleepers.
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