Weather Central (Pitt Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Kooser, Ted

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822937964 ISBN 13: 9780822937968

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994

Synopsis

Ted Kooser’s third book in the Pitt Poetry Series is a selection of poems published in literary journals over a ten year period by a writer whose work has been praised for its clarity and accessiblity, its mastery of figurative language, and its warmth and charm.

About this title

About the Author

<b>Ted Kooser</b> was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939. He was educated in the Ames public schools, at Iowa State University, and the University of Nebraska. His awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia magazine, and the 1981 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry for Sure Signs. His poems have appeared in many magazines including the <i>Antioch Review</i>, the <i>Hudson Review</i>, and the <i>Kenyon Review</i>.

Reviews

As the excellent critic Dana Gioia has remarked (Can Poetry Matter? [1992]), Kooser is a popular poet in the sense that he speaks of nonliterary experience in nonliterary language. You don't have to know literature or literary manners to get a lot out of his poetry; it's not highfalutin. Because he writes of such ordinary things as noticing the weather, suddenly remembering one's own past, and imaginatively projecting our human consciousness into other creatures and even things (see "A Heart of Gold," the "protagonist" of which is a bottle of beer), he runs the risk of sentimentality, of letting emotion overpower reason and observable reality. But sentimentality rarely gets the better of him, and to anyone familiar with the great, regular middle of North America--Kooser was born in Iowa but lives in Nebraska--the scenes and actions in his poetry (especially the way that, in several poems, light--the quintessential physical reality on the plains--is a virtually corporeal actor) will seem, to paraphrase Pope, things often seen but ne'er so well observed. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822937964
• ISBN 13: 9780822937968
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104