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Guest Review: Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser

Today’s guest review of Ted Kooser’s Delights & Shadows is by a good friend and blogging pal of mine, Anna from Diary of an Eccentric.  It didn’t take too much arm twisting to get her to participate in Celebrating Indie & Small Press Month; All I had to do was give her a book to read.  She also gets to count this one for the Fearless Poetry Reading Challenge I’m hosting . . . see how diabolical I am?!

Ok, on with the review:

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser won the Pulitzer Prize for Delights & Shadows, which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. Kooser’s poetry is what one would call “accessible” because it doesn’t take much deciphering or pondering to get at least a surface understanding, though some of his poems go much deeper.

Delights & Shadows is a collection of quiet poems touching upon such themes as memory, aging, death, and nature. Kooser obviously spends a lot of time observing his surroundings, and many of his poems bring ordinary objects or simple moments to life. When Kooser looks at the world, he sees things that many of us would miss, and the descriptions of what he sees are fascinating. In “Tattoo,” Kooser describes an old man browsing a yard sale and contemplates his past after he sees a tough-guy tattoo on his arm. In “A Rainy Morning,” he compares a woman pushing herself in a wheelchair to a pianist, writing “So expertly she plays the chords/of this difficult music she has mastered” (page 15).

Kooser manages to say so much in just a line or two. In “Father,” in remembering his father’s illness, he writes “you have been gone for twenty years,/and I am glad for all of us, although/I miss you every day” (page 36). In “Horse,” he calls a horse “the 19th century” (page 56), which calls to mind civilization’s past dependence on the animal. Other poems compare a pegboard to ancient cave drawings, describe the moment in which a bike rider pedals off, and use a spiral notebook to conjure memories of the past.

Delights & Shadows also includes a couple of narrative poems, poems that tell a story in verse. In “Pearl,” Kooser talks about visiting his mother’s childhood playmate to tell her that his mother has died. My favorite poem in the collection is “The Beaded Purse,” about a man taking home the coffin containing the body of his daughter, who’d left home to pursue an acting career and hadn’t been home in years.

Kooser is a master of quiet observation and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. In Delights & Shadows, he describes the delights in these simple things, as well as the shadows of the past that these objects and observations conjure up.

Delights & Shadows was published by Copper Canyon Press, which was founded in 1972 and publishes only poetry. The company’s pressmark is the Chinese character for poetry, which stands for “word” and “temple.”

Disclosure: I borrowed Delights & Shadows from Serena to review for Independent and Small Press Month. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon affiliate.

Thanks, Anna, for participating in Celebrate! Indie & Small Press Month!  Seems to me that you really enjoyed this collection.  What other Kooser books will you be reading?

Comments

  1. Thanks! You, too!

  2. Beth Hoffman says

    I adore Ted Kooser’s works. I’ll often pick up Flying at Night or Delights & Shadows and just open to a random page for the sheer joy of his words. Wonderful review, Anna!

  3. I’m glad Anna enjoyed this one. I need to get braver about poetry!

    • You just have to grab a poetry book and jump right in. I’m glad I didn’t let my initial intimidation prevent me from reading it. I would have missed out on a great book.

  4. Thanks for asking me to participate, diabolical one! 😉

  5. This is a brilliant review. I have found poetry anthology the most tasking of all reviews. Yet, Anna has excellently done it. I listened to Ted read Pearl and I fell in love with his choice of words. You make me want to read this. Thanks for this review

Trackbacks

  1. […] Amber Stults (The Bells)91. Yvann (Molvania)92. Yvann (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet)93. Diary of an Eccentric (Delights & Shadows)94. Diary of an Eccentric (Staying at Daisy’s)95. Diary of an Eccentric (Inkblot)96. Gina @ […]

  2. […] to revisit the poetry of Ted Kooser, having recently reviewed his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Delights & Shadows.  I learned some interesting tidbits about some of the poets, including Louise Glück, who refused […]

  3. […] course, I was more than happy to take part!  Check out my guest review of a brilliant poetry collection, Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser, which also is my first book […]