Splitting an Order

August 18, 2014
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Kooser’s long-awaited follow-up to 2005’s PulitzerPrize–winning Delights and Shadows is a journey of intimacies, a stroll through lives and minds via common objects and quotidian occurrences, that brims over with small profundities and discoveries. “Because it arrives while you sleep,” Kooser writes in “Bad News,” “it’s the one call you never pick up/ on the first ring.” Writing in the soft, casual tone he’s best known for, his focuses are the telephone, the sundial, the birdhouse, and the Arby’s meal. Kooser explores the bonds of love and friendship with simple insights into the marvels of existence and meditations on aging and weariness: “she stepped outside, and placed one foot/ and then the other on the future, and it held her up.” In “Tree Removal,” “the tree makes its exit with grace,/ going down slowly, one piece at a time.” Old objects, present and remembered, become the markers by which a mind reconstitutes and evaluates a life, “forever wading/ into the next hour, followed by the rest.” Kooser, alone “among the others who have stood here,” observes the slow summation of past and present people and things, all “becoming a piece of some great, rusty work/ we seem to fit exactly.”

Starred review from October 1, 2014

There is a comfort in reading these poems from Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Kooser: the cozy notion that despite modern technology, he is there, observing the world deeply and writing the words needed to ground us. Readers will find "characters" both strange and wonderful, animal or human. There is a sense that time is passing quickly and that everything worthy must be captured and savored, from an old couple lovingly sharing a sandwich to another sowing seed potatoes to a tribute to an old dog who waits as age and winter approach: "its rippling scent a cold/ that floats on the rest of the cold/ like a snake on a pool." Included is an essay about a first house in which shootings and a murder later take place, illustrating how time and circumstance can startle and strike memory. VERDICT Master of the single-metaphor poem, Kooser offers images that evolve, fluid and unforced: "This old hand with which I am writing/ holding its pen and pecking its way/ across the paper like a hen, has pulled me/ clucking with little discoveries/ across more than seventy years." Recommended.--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2014
While the prose pieces in Kooser's The Wheeling Year (2014) are painterlytheir lines, virtually all the same, broad brush-stroke lengththe poems of Kooser's new collection reflect another interest of his in the visual arts, photography. A painting may fix a place or person; a photograph fixes time, also. In a poem, Kooser typically sees somethingan old man cutting a sandwich in half to share with his wife, a drift of leaves sliced through by a moving car, an aged apple treeand sets it before us. Then, imagination takes over, memory and fancy, too, for a poem is made with words rather than light. The object of the poem's sight, so to speak, opens up its history, personal or communal, and, as or more important, its emotional connections to the poet and the reader. Those fallen leaves, by means of their fleshlike color, become hands welcoming the car, welcoming the driver, wishing him well. I found myself laughing, the poet says, as may the reader. Such revelations of the pervasive human presence as observer and participant in a world perhaps made for people are common in Kooser's poems. Pretty impressive for a photographer. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)