The Wheeling Year

September 15, 2014
Kooser's painter friend Keith Jacobshagen keeps a journal that's all drawings, watercolor sketches, and observations and that Kooser says he covets. Here he offers his own prose analog, a year's worth of sketches and landscape studies made out of words. Greatly aiding any resemblance between Jacobshagen's and the poet's journals is the fact that Kooser is a good amateur painter. These prose jottings, each appearing in a chapter titled with the month of its writing, are pictorial, neatly detailed, and modestly narrative, like Kooser's poems. They differ from his poems in a couple of interesting ways. They indulge in the pathetic fallacy much more; in them, animals, objects, and intangibles, even, have feelings, motivations, and, it seems, intentions. They are more whimsical, sometimes verging on silly. They're about the same things as the poems, of courseold people, farm stuff (especially tools), critters domestic and wild, weather and fields, the sun and the starsand they afford the same kind of deep pleasure in creation and humanity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)