Items related to Delights & Shadows
“Kooser is straightforward, possesses an American essence, is humble, gritty, ironic and has a gift for detail and a deceptive simplicity.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
This signed, limited edition celebrates the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection by former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.
Delights and Shadows is one of the best-selling poetry books in America, and Ted Kooser—editor of the weekly column “American Life in Poetry”—is a beloved poet. While serving as poet laureate, he stated, “I hope to interest more people in poetry. I hope to perform a service as a poet, giving people something they can use.” Kooser certainly succeeded.
While Delights and Shadows has been lavishly reviewed in major media throughout the country, reader responses about the book have poured into Copper Canyon Press. A reader from rural New York wrote, “Kooser’s tenth book of poems is a work of profound insight into the core of human existence and feeling.” Another from Virginia wrote, “An instantly attractive collection by a poet unknown to me, who sees remarkable things in everyday objects. Today I ordered five more of his previous books at a local store.”
Ted Kooser, author of thirteen books of poetry and nonfiction, is the former poet laureate of the United States. He lives in Nebraska.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
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.
From The Washington Post:
A Winter Morning
A farmhouse window far back from the highway
speaks to the darkness in a small, sure voice.
Against this stillness, only a kettle's whisper,
and against the starry cold, one small blue ring of flame.
A farmhouse window far back from the highway
speaks to the darkness in a small, sure voice.
Against this stillness, only a kettle's whisper,
and against the starry cold, one small blue ring of flame.
Ted Kooser
The appointment of Ted Kooser as the nation's new poet laureate puts me in mind of other poets from Nebraska who have meant a good deal to me: Willa Cather (1873-1947), John Neihardt (1881-1973), Weldon Kees (1914-1955) and Loren Eiseley (1907-1977).
Something about the Great Plains seems to foster a plain, homemade style, a sturdy forthrightness with hidden depths, a hard-won clarity chastened by experience. It is an unadorned, pragmatic, quintessentially American poetry of empty places, of farmland and low-slung cities. The open spaces stimulate and challenge people. One's mettle is tested. Cather said that coming to Nebraska was like being "thrown onto a land as bare as a piece of sheet iron."
The poets from Nebraska tend to have a reticent manner and a determinedly accessible style, a sensitivity to the natural world that at times reminds me of the Chinese poets. This is a modest, stubborn kind of poetry that owes a great debt to the native American sensibility. Seasons rotate and weather matters. Natural disasters are real. The visible world informs the verbal one. Yet there are also spiritual presences. The seemingly ordinary world turns out to be extraordinary. If you can learn to read the signs, every landscape has a genuine story to tell. Here is Eiseley's poem "Prairie Spring," which shows something of his gift as a literary naturalist:
Killdeer screaming over the flowing acres
of bronze grass now the buffalo are gone
make a wide eery silence. In the midst of crying
April has come but meadow flowers alone
spring up to greet her. No more the hooves will thunder
of bison moving northward in the spring.
No more the violet by wet black muzzles
will be cropped under -- a long silence follows
after the flashing and exultant wing.
There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, a book of portraits and landscapes, Delights & Shadows. Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms. The book begins with a poem called "Walking on Tiptoe" and ends with one entitled "A Happy Birthday." It takes an epigraph from Emily Dickinson -- "The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can" -- but just as easily could have taken one from Wallace Stevens: "Death is the mother of beauty." Mortality is omnipresent and induces a deep attentiveness. Everyone here -- a young woman in a wheelchair, a skater dressed in black, a group of mourners after a funeral, the poet himself -- seems to be moving lightly over an invisible abyss. "There are days when the fear of death/ is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates/ everything," he writes in "Surviving." "Were it not for the way you taught me to look/ at the world, to see the life at play in everything," he writes to his mother who has been dead just one month, "I would have to be lonely forever."
A Happy BirthdayThis evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.
By Edward Hirsch
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherCopper Canyon Press
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 1556592434
- ISBN 13 9781556592430
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages96
- Rating
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