Newly minted Poet Laureate Ted Kooser has history working against him. In the last 67 years since the creation of the post, the Librarian of Congress has appointed fewer than a dozen truly notable figures. Most Poets Laureate, or Consultants in Poetry, as it was termed before 1986, have already been forgotten, lacking the staying power that truly strong poets possess. But lucky for Kooser, he comes in during a string of strong Poets Laureate that has not been seen since the run of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Conrad Aiken, William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost in the late ’40s and ’50s.
Whether Kooser has the strength to survive the judgment of history cannot yet be answered. But while the question lingers, his latest book “Delights & Shadows” certainly solidifies his place in contemporary poetry. A beautiful and sometimes shockingly simple book, “Delights & Shadows” hovers around the edges of the ordinary to discover the beauty in everyday experience, hinting at deeper questions and a burning intellectual life underneath the surface.
Like Wallace Stevens, Kooser spent much of his life as an insurance company executive, but any comparison between Stevens and Kooser quickly breaks down. While both embrace the imagination, they do so in very different ways. Stevens tends toward the meditative, towards capturing the essence of a mind at play; Kooser follows the Nebraskan tradition more closely, eschewing the more traditional European form of allusion and intense emotion for a simpler and more direct style. His poetry focuses on specific experience, on describing what has happened rather than the effect of what has happened.
In this he might be more easily classed alongside William Carlos Williams. Besides sharing an appointment by the Librarian of Congress (although Williams refused to serve due to what he called the “indignities” asked of him during the McCarthy era), the poets share a desire to get more towards a direct American experience. They speak of their simple experiences, of cooking applesauce or of the lines of a sycamore tree. In these simple experiences deep and abiding desires lurk — the desire for connection, the desire for knowledge and the desire to find a sense of balance in an unbalanced world.
Perhaps it is this sense of desire more than anything else that dominates “Delights & Shadows.” In “Telescope,” he talks of the desire for that sense of knowledge found in science: “This is the pipe that pierces the dam/ that holds back the universe / … and we are able to sleep, at least for now, / beneath the straining wall of darkness.” That piercing knowledge moves on in other poems, such as “Garage Sale.” In “Garage Sale,” he searches for connection with a woman whose husband is strangely absent: “Where can he be / while I chat with you about the rain … / I walk so empty-handed to my car.” The desires for connection, knowledge and balance intersect in poems throughout the book.
Critics have panned Kooser’s earlier work as too sentimental and simple, but it is precisely that sentimentality and simplicity that is at the core of his strength, as it was for Williams. As the title implies, his poetry in “Delights & Shadows” shows not only the things that delight, but also hints at the shadows they cast. In the above-mentioned “Garage Sale” we are given a sense of darkness under the beauty of meeting someone, of an honest, if somewhat detached, connection. The question of her husband pervades the poem, a glimpse at her life as laid out on the tables of garage sale only heightens the questioning. There is a sense of tragedy underneath, a subtle but unmistakable darkness that threatens to overturn the carefully crafted poem. Yet the questions remain even when poem after poem struggle to remain upright.
Kooser’s place in history may not yet be determined, but with “Delights & Shadows” he is certainly on his way to being the successor to the poetic tradition of William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and others who attempt to find an authentic, experiential American voice.
Grade: A/B
