Ted Kooser: Delights and Shadows

I made a mistake when I started to read this book. I mistook Kooser for another Billy Collins, another engaging, idiomatic poet whose chief virtue is his accesibility. Collins has a way with imagery, but I take his work to be brothy, meatless. At first, I thought Kooser was the same.

The first thing that tipped me off to something more in this volume was the consistency of topic. Poem after poem in this collection is a profound metaphorical analysis of a simple household object or a mundane image: a jar of buttons, a girl holding a gyroscope, creamed corn, a telescope. Kooser wows repeatedly with his take on these silly little items, but the fact that he focuses time and again on the same sort of seemingly innocuous image tips the reader off to something more. Many poets write an ode to something stupid like a Grecian urn, but a whole volume of such things simply must be about something more.

That something more came into focus when I read the poem "Father". Kooser says that the father's voice was "delighted with stories", nicely skewed turn of phrase in its own right. But the word "delight" is also in the title, which makes an alert reader take notice. From that point, I was watchful for the words "delight" and "shadow" in the poems, eagerly looking for a connection. Of course "Delights and Shadows" is a perfectly subtle and suitable title without anything deper--and it took thick ole me a while to realize the play on "lights and shadows". But when one realizes that by delights Kooser means "Stories", as in "Father", and that by shadows he means "Ghosts", as in "Pearl", the whole volume takes shape.

Each object, each image that Kooser dissects into its poetic components has a story, a delight, and a ghostly shadow as well. The "Flow Blue China" overflows with stories of heapingly generous meals, and the ghost of a seventy-year-old woman reaches out from the sentences. No object is dead or inanimate. Each is an amphora, possessed with the spirits of the dead who used it. And it is not merely his personal memories , his own dead, Kooser seals into these poems like mausoleums. "Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer" contains the delights and shadows of an entire country.

What is amazing is that Kooser does all of this while never obscuring his meaning or alienating his reader. One never really is asked to decipher these poems, simply to meet them. At last a good poet that I can send to my brother without recieving a text message to the effect, "WTF? I dont get it."