| American |
| Poetry |
Summary
Summary
Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
"Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance."-- Poetry
"[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
" Delights & 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." -- Bloomsbury Review
Ted Kooser is a master of metaphor, a poet who deftly connects disparate elements of the world and communicates with absolute precision. Critics call him a "haiku-like imagist" and his poems have been compared to Chekov's short stories. In Delights and Shadows , Kooser draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life. Quotidian objects like a pegboard, creamed corn and a forgotten salesman's trophy help reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world.
Ted Kooser is the author of eight collections of poems and a prose memoir. He lives on a small farm in rural Nebraska.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Retired life insurance executive Ted Kooser is better known as the author of Sure Signs and nine other books of poems, as well as of the recent memoir Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemia Alps than for policies sold. Divided into four sections, these 59 poems take us from time "Walking on Tiptoe" and "At the Cancer Clinic" to "A Jar of Buttons," "A Box of Pastels" and "A Glimpse of the Eternal": "Just now,/ a sparrow lighted/ on a pine bough/ right outside/ my bedroom window/ and a puff/ of yellow pollen/ flew away." (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Like Kentucky's Wendell Berry, Kooser is a poet of place. But just as Kooser's eastern Nebraska is more modestly impressive than Berry's lush, riverine Kentucky, Kooser's poetry is more restrained than Berry's. Kooser is less big-C culturally concerned, less anxious about the destiny of nation and world. Kooser carries religion far more lightly; he envisions faith passing as casually from door to door as a pair of plaster or plastic Praying Hands en route to every thrift shop in America. Having survived a major health crisis, Kooser is warier of death; in Surviving he writes of days when the fear of death / is as ubiquitous as light, extending even to the ladybird beetle, paralyzed when the fear of death, so attentive / to everything living, comes near. Though he focuses as often as Berry on memories, Kooser is less historically and more personally conscious in his poems of recollection. And Berry has come up with no finer metaphor than that of Kooser's Memory, in which recall is a benignly ruthless tornado. --Ray Olson Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
"There are days when the fear of death/ is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates/ everything." Kooser's world is indeed illuminated, though more by an awareness of mortality and the importance of every moment. Here it illuminates a ladybug beetle but elsewhere shirts and slacks, "a bank of threatening clouds/ that hang from a pipe between two ladders" at a yard sale, the small town set in an abandoned mini golf course or simply a quartz pebble he notices by the toe of his boot. "I held it to the light/ and could almost see through it/ into the grand explanation." Kooser's ninth collection of poems (e.g., Local Wonders) 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. There is much to celebrate in these small-town poems about small-town people and a reminder to all of us how America's voice and warm wisdom resonate from the middle. Highly recommended.-Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.