Delights & Shadows (Ted Kooser)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2004

Ted Kooser is a poet of the moment. For the most part, he eschews the sweeping statements poets often make ("To be or not to be," anyone?) and concentrates instead on minute observations about the natural world and people around him. His style is prose-y in its adherence to normal sentence structure and grammar (something I, for one, am thankful for), and he makes little to no use of stanza breaks. He is precise and never jarring in his use of descriptive language.

The end result is a series of still lifes that are like reflections in a calm pond: while there may be deeper currents underneath, those currents are not overly accessible, and the image is all that will remain with most readers.

Here's a short example:

Biker

Pulling away from a stoplight
with a tire's sharp bark,
he lifts his scuffed boot and kicks at the air,
and the old dog of inertia gets up with a growl
and shrinks out of the way.


It's a very well-crafted metaphor, certainly, but I have a hard time getting beneath that to any other sort of truth.

This is not to say that this kind of poetry can't be beautiful or meaningful. It is just a certain style that you may like or not, depending on your poetical predilections. I for one am more fond of poetry that is a little more outwardly emotional, that perhaps pulls the focus back from the beauty of the image and lets some greater image resolve.

It's not surprising, then, that my favorite poems in Delights & Shadows are the ones in which Kooser breaks his own rules a little and allows a little of himself to shine through his work. There's a handful of poems, maybe a half-dozen or so out of the maybe six dozen in the collection, that appeals more to my sensibilities. Obviously the following poem is not representative of the collection, but it is representative of that dazzling handful. I'll leave you all with it:

After Years

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Recommended? Depends very much on your own tastes. I can't say I'll go back to this book fondly over the years, but it's high-quality, whether or not you like his style.