Volume 24 47
use creamed corn as a metaphor for race relations.
But it comes more from Kooser’s outlook than
from any particular flaw in his use of rural Ne-
braska settings or his plainspoken register. His po-
ems are written from the perspective of a man who
has resolved his life’s pressing conflicts, who now
moves familiarly among the larger, lasting uncer-
tainties. The range of his book is the mild emo-
tional fall and swell of livable contentment: Kooser
looks forward quietly to death (the old people in
one poem “are feeling their way out into the night, /
letting their eyes adjust to the future”) and cele-
brates his daily life and his memories, without
probing much beyond his confidence in everyday
grace. Some lovely images (“the wind turns the
pages of rain”) provide a few more animated mo-
ments in the placid stasis of the rest.
Source:Brian Phillips, Review of Delights & Shadows, in
Poetry, Vol. 185, No. 5, February 2005, p. 396.
Kathleen De Grave
In the following review, De Grave finds
“bright image,... compassionate tone, and....
Insight into human nature” across Kooser’s col-
lection, Delights & Shadows.
Opening Ted Kooser’s collection of poetry,
Delights & Shadowsis like walking into an art
gallery, each poem a painting or photograph, some-
times a sculpture. Kooser is the Poet Laureate of
the United States, has ten books of poems published
and has received numerous awards, including two
NEA fellowships, and this book lives up to that rep-
utation. The collection of poetry is broken into four
parts, each with its theme or motif. But common
threads are the bright image, the compassionate
tone, and the insight into human nature.
The first section, “Walking on Tiptoe,” is in
some respects indeed like an art gallery, a hall of
portraits. Each poem is a brilliant moment in the
life of a child, an old man, a student. The poems
rise from image to insight, as if, as the lead poem
of the section says, we are “suddenly able to see in
the dark.” Stereotypes turn human, as in “Tattoo,”
which gives us a man in a tight black T-shirt with
“a dripping dagger held in the fist / of a shudder-
ing heart” on his arm. By the end of the poem, the
man has shown his age as he picks among the trin-
kets at a garage sale, “his heart gone soft and blue
with stories.” Sometimes a poem develops a sub-
terranean metaphor, as in “Student,” in which we
suddenly realize we are not watching merely a stu-
dent, hung over, trudging up the steps of the library,
but humanity in evolution, as the student “swings
his stiff arms and cupped hands.” A key line is the
one in the center of the poem: “backward as up he
crawls, out of the froth.” It is his baseball cap that
is backward and it is the “froth / of a hangover,”
but the evolutionary tie is clear by the last line,
when the student “lumbers heavy with hope” into
the library. Kooser has commented on this poem in
his guide for beginning poets, The Poetry Home
Repair Manual,explaining the genesis of the poem:
He saw a connection between the student and a tur-
tle. But the poem takes an extra step, growing be-
yond Kooser’s own intentions.
These poems often resonate beyond the image
and do, in fact, much more than portraits can, mak-
ing us question our assumptions about human life
and our own natures. One of the most evocative
poems of this section is “The Old People,” with its
image of the old walking into a “cold river of shad-
ows,” hearing us calling, sometimes, sometimes
not, because “They are feeling their way out into
the night.” All of these poems are short and intense,
and some uneasily beautiful. “A Rainy Morning,”
for instance, compares a woman in a wheelchair to
a pianist: she “strikes at the wheels, then lifts her
long white fingers,” “her wet face beautiful in its
concentration.” It takes the mind and art of a mas-
ter to turn disability into music.
The second section, titled “The China
Painters,” is about memory and family, on an Iowa
farm. The speaker of “Memory” imagines that he
has used his pen as a tornado, that “peeled back”
the roof, “reached down and snatched up / uncles
and cousins, grandma, grandpa” and then “held
them like dolls, looked / long and longingly into
their faces.” The poems in this section give the long
look—at the speaker’s mother who recently died.
She taught him “to see the life at play in every-
thing”; at his grandmother throwing out dishwater,
creating “a bridge that leaps from her hot red
hands” turning into “a glorious rainbow / with an
empty dishpan swinging at one end”; and at his fa-
ther who thankfully did not live into old age, a
“fearful hypochondriac” following “the compli-
cated, fading map of cures.” This section holds the
longest poem of the book, “Pearl.” The speaker
goes to tell a 90 year old woman that his mother,
her friend, has died. Pearl is frail herself and has
“started seeing people who aren’t here.” The
speaker’s futile effort to save her helps us under-
stand his grief at his mother’s death.
As if the art gallery metaphor holds true, sec-
tion three, “Bank Fishing for Bluegills” has a se-
ries of poems based on “Four Civil War PaintingsAt the Cancer Clinic