Red Stilts (paperback) - Softcover

Kooser, Ted

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556596499 ISBN 13: 9781556596490

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2022

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Red Stilts finds Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser at the top of his imaginative and storytelling powers. Here are the richly metaphorical, imagistically masterful, clear and accessible poems for which he has become widely known. Kooser writes for an audience of everyday readers and believes poets “need to write poetry that doesn’t make people feel stupid.” Each poem in Red Stilts strives to reveal the complex beauties of the ordinary, of the world that’s right under our noses. Right under Kooser’s nose is rural America, most specifically the Great Plains, with its isolated villages, struggling economy, hard-working people and multiple beauties that surpass everything wrecked, wrong, or in error.

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About the Author

Ted Kooser received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Delights and Shadows, and also served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States. As Poet Laureate, he established a weekly newspaper column, "American Life in Poetry," which is carried in over 150 newspapers, as well as online, and has an estimated circulation of three and a half million readers around the world. Kooser is the author of over twenty books, including five for children. He lives in a small town in Nebraska.

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Spring Landscape

A wake of black waves foamy with pebbles
follows the plow, rolls all the way up
to the fence, slaps into the grass and trickles
back, while farther out a spray of white gulls,
wings like splashes, are splashing down.
Spring on the prairie, a sky reaching forever
in every direction, and here at my feet,
distilled from all that blue, a single drop
caught in the spoon of a leaf, a robin’s egg.

A Woman and Two Men

I was past in an instant. It was raining,
just softly, after a morning-long shower,
no sounds but the hiss of the pavement,
my wipers whupping on low. Two men
in hardhats were parked on the shoulder
in a truck with a ladder rack and a bed
full of tools. A woman driving a pickup
with a camper had pulled up a few yards
behind them and had walked up the road
to the passenger’s side, her hair wet,
her arms wrapped about her. She had
boots, a fringed leather jacket with beads
on the fringe, and jeans with galaxies
of rhinestones on the pockets. The man
on the passenger’s side had rolled down
his window, but only partway, and was
staring out over the hood while the driver
leaned far forward and over to talk,
his shoulder pressed into the wheel,
all this in a flash, those three at the side
of the highway, the fourth glancing over
in passing. I could in that instant feel
something common between us, among us,
around us, within us. It was more than
a light April rain playing over a road.

Up the Block

Maybe you saw me pass by, walking,
or maybe you didn’t. I raised a hand
in a tentative wave, but you were intent
upon your watering, as if to make sure
the spray from the hose fell evenly
over your small plot of petunias, purple
, pink, and white. The nozzle was yellow,
of plastic, much like a showerhead,
sweeping or brushing the bright drops
evenly, lacquering over the flowers,
the dark purple ones deeper in color
under the layers of glazes, and the pink
brighter, too. The white looked the same,
but you’d probably planted those there
mostly to set off the others. From one end
to the other you slowly and gently
swept the soft whiskbroom of droplets,
enrapt, or so it appeared, by what
you saw sprinkling out of your hand,
upon which I could see drops forming,
each diamond-bright on a knuckle,
and I’d guess they were cold, perhaps
even numbing, but you’d gotten hold
of a rainbow, and couldn’t let go.