DELIGHTS & SHADOWS
By
Ted Kooser
Port
Paper, ISBN 1-55659-201-9
87 pages, $15.00
Ted Kooser s Delights & Shadows is a quiet but beautiful song of clarity, like clear clean water, the taste just as pure. Not dense, not academic it s accessible and lucid, revealing the remarkable within the ordinary. Consider his poem about a young man with a tattoo who is now old:
What
once was meant to be a statement
a
dripping dagger held in the fist
of
a shuddering heart is now just a bruise
on
a bony old shoulder, the spot
where
vanity once punched him hard
and
the ache lingered on.
While the man with a tattoo was once someone to be reckoned with,
he
is only another old man, picking up
broken
tools and putting them back,
his
heart gone soft and blue with stories.
The precise image here, the way Kooser poses the broken tools with age, is a mark of his skill as a poet. So, too, is the recurring theme of age, with the image of old folks with pantcuffs rolled, in old shoes, stumbling into a cold river of shadows/far from the fire.
They
are not searching
for
anything much, nor are they much
in
need of finding something new.
They
are feeling their way into the night,
letting
their eyes adjust to the future.
Unlike many, Kooser s view of the future, much like his view of the present and the past, holds a good share of generosity toward life, such as the lyrical piece on his father, dead for 20 years, who would have been 97 on the day Kooser wrote the poem, which blends into one the past, present, and future:
On
this day each year you loved to relate
that
at the moment of your birth
your
mother glanced out the window
and
saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs
are blooming in side yards
all
over
In
lesser hands, such a poem would not work, but Kooser knows just the way to form
the words, to say something worth saying, and to communicate clearly an art
lost to many. This was, perhaps, best
seen in the short imagistic poems in Braided Creek, the
This
is the tiny moth who lives on tears,
who
drinks like a deer at the gleaming pool
at
the edge of the sleeper s eye, the touch
of its mouth as light as a cloud s reflection.
Kooser s ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift, leaving us with a sense of what Blake called a higher innocence:
All
night, this soft rain from the distant past.
No
wonder I sometimes waken as a child.
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