Ted Kooser, Poet Extraordinaire

This yellow-walled study is cheery and cozy this morning while it’s wet outside from overnight rain. It’s the kind of day that makes you want to do nothing but read. Or go walking in the rain. How refreshing that is, depending on where you are, how you’re dressed, and how torrential the rain is.

This weather made me think of a certain book which may not have any rain in it, but I doubt that. It’s been a few years since I read Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders with its subtitle Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, but it’s one of the top ten best books I’ve ever read, perhaps the top five, perhaps three. (I shall read it again soon.) Kooser is a poet but he’s writing prose here. However, these 153 pages are filled with poetic gems. All readers should enjoy reading about this rural area in southeastern Nebraska that he calls home. That is, what the poet sees in this rural area, and that covers all the other senses as well. What beauty he uncovers in simple things, such as the trash collected around the base of a tree in the woods.

I first "met" Kooser several years ago when I came across a poem of his in a poetry magazine. I couldn’t let it go. I wrote to the editor about getting permission to republish it in a literary newsletter I edited at the time. Connection made, I did run his poem in the newsletter and sent him a copy of the publication, as he requested. If you want to look up this delightful poem, it’s just six lines called “Old Soldiers’ Home,” the whole thing a testimony to his magnificent mastery of figurative language. Too bad I don’t have permission to copy it here, but I don’t. You can find it in his Sure Signs, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.

After that time Kooser wrote on, in spite of cancer, and became Poet Laureate consultant to the Library of Congress of the United States from 2004 to 2006.

Among the chief adjectives that describe the poetry of Ted Kooser is “accessible.” For those of you not into poetry, that merely means the reader can understand what the poet is talking about. Figurative language and humor are paramount. I just can’t praise enough this little volume of his prose. It would make a Christmas present of the highest order. You can get it from the University of Nebraska Press. Hardcover at $22.00.

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