Delights & Shadows Book

For my second attempt at understanding poetry, I chose to stay home and read an author from my neck of the woods. DELIGHTS AND SHADOWS is a beautiful collection of poems that bring normal, everyday objects to life, embedding within them deeper meanings and subtle stories. Most of the poems feel almost as if my grandfather were still alive, talking to me, sharing whatever wisdom and insight he had about a particular topic, and this brings me great joy and sorrow. The words Ted Kooser'winner of the Pulitzer Prize for DELIGHTS AND SHADOWS'uses resonate long after reading one of his poems. It is almost as if Kooser challenges us to reflect upon the ordinary, daring us to see beyond.

The Georgia Review calls Kooser "an authentic poet of the American people" and I am happy to agree. In all of us, no matter if you live on the East Coast or West Coast, in Texas, or Alaska, and everywhere in between, stories of our ancestors murmur frequently through unsuspecting items such as a jar of buttons or a gyroscope or a telescope or a beaded purse. It is this type of magic that Kooser uses to associate death with a pearl beaded purse, or lilacs blooming to remember his father. Oh, perhaps this is sentimentality at its finest and I have been duped into reading poetry that some find elementary or arbitrary as some of the reviewers have called his poems "easy" and "lacking depth," but I think that is missing the point. Like Billy Collins, Ted Kooser uses straightforward metaphors and allusions to get his point across. Leaving you scratching your head in wonder is never his objective. He wants to move you and make you think. He wants you to be able to relate to his words and images. Yes, there is a level of clarity and accessibility that may strike some as the poet being lazy, but this is intentional. As the back of the book suggests, "each [poem] revels the remarkable within an otherwise ordinary world."

I couldn't agree more.

Here are three of my favorites:

STUDENT

The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into the wave after wave of responsibility,
And he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,

padding ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,
breaks the cold surf. He's got his baseball cap on

backwards as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.


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.

(THIS ONE MAY NOT SEEM VERY SPECIAL TO SOME, BUT I LIVE IN STURGIS, SOUTH DAKOTA, HOME TO THE STURGIS RALLY)

A JAR OF BUTTONS

This is a core sample
from the floor of the Sea of Mending,

a cylinder packed with shells
that over many years

sank through fathoms of shirts'
pearl buttons, blue buttons'

and settled together
beneath waves of perseverance,

an ocean upon which
generations of women set forth,

under the sails of gingham curtains,
and, seated side by side

on decks sometimes salted with tears,
made small but important repairs.
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Again, maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I know how I felt after reading these poems.

VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED