Delights and Shadows
Poems by Ted Kooser
Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2005
ISBN 1-55659-201-9
96 pp., US$15.00 paperback

Ted Kooser is the current U.S. Poet Laureate, joining the politically inclusive ranks of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Rita Dove, the Roberts Hass and Pinsky, Billy Collins and his immediate predecessor, Louise Gluck. “The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress serves as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulses of Americans” it says on the Library’s website. If Kooser’s Delights and Shadows, which won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize, has caught the national electricity, it very effectively conducts it into the ground.

He is fully in the tradition of American plainspeak poetry begun by Whitman and Thoreau and brought into a suburban context by William Carlos Williams, who, besides his major opus about life in Paterson, New Jersey, wrote fish-out-of-water poems about his foreign vacations. (Thoreau was so quintessentially American he felt no need to leave the country. “I have travelled widely in Concord, Massachusetts,” he said.)

Riding the bifurcated current of recent American poetry are, in one branch, the rock-rib homebodies— represented by Kooser and 2006 Pulitzer prizewinner Claudia Emerson —and in the other the aristo mandarins—most notably John Ashbery and Jorie Graham—with countless minor poets either dipping their feet in both streams or looking for a little tributary of their own.

The homespun genre, so different in focus and diction from the cosmopolitan poetry of their privileged rivals, gives eternity “a local habitation and a name.” Believing that Walden Pond or Paterson's Contagious Hospital provide as much opportunity for transcendence as the Sistine Chapel or the antiquities of Boro Badur, the down-homers gaze at their local environments with the astonishment of Zen poets, shaking off expectations and blinding habits of seeing, following Emerson's advice to "new name all things."

Many critics, preferring for whatever reasons that literature be seasoned with foreign phrases, references to Greek gods and other proofs of a poet’s erudition, are aghast at Kooser’s unprivileged straight talk, as in the following poem:

Pegboard

It has been carefully painted
with the outlines of tools
to show us which belongs where,
auger and drawknife,
claw hammer and crosscut saw,
like the outlines of hands on the walls
of ancient caves in France,
painted with soot mixed with spit
ten thousand years ago
in the faltering firelight of time,
hands borrowed to work on the world
and never returned.

He has been called a corn-fed yokel and a sentimental provincial. One critic (William Logan) even complained that Kooser writes about his corner grocery store instead of the “baristas” at Starbucks! Must poetry moon over Tuscan landscapes and Roman ruins to shows its sophistication? Truth is, most Americans have not visited the Uffizi Gallery, driven along the Amalfi coast or rowed a punt down the Cam. Our experience, by and large, is not so different from Kooser’s. He is not all hayloft and henyard. Typical is the experience he describes in “A Happy Birthday":

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could have easily switched on the lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

 Kooser’s poetry is radiant with revelatory moments, domestic epiphanies in which a tool or twilight in a quiet house discloses large patterns overarching an individual life, mysteries understood for an instant.

But ultimately, Kooser leaves out so much of contemporary American reality as to throw his status as poet into question. It is perhaps unfair to criticize art for what it is not, but when that absence distorts the poet's ostensible subject—contemporary life—it amounts to a lie.

Because the everyday is shadowed by ugliness and psychic darkness, poetry that avoids the terrifying, the unbeautiful and the cruel offers a false vision, and so turns away from the possibility of greatness. Claudia Emerson is less guilty of this than Kooser. Even when he writes of the death of his beloved wife, Kooser is so stiff-upper-lipped that he seems to be unemotional, or British. In his world, tragedy is hidden, grief repressed, loss and injustice passively received. He protests nothing, never curses the night.

Not every poet is confessional in the manner of an Anne Sexton or a Robert Lowell. Like William Carlos Williams before him, Ted Kooser conducts no public self-analysis or breast-beating. But a repugnance for such indulgences does not justify a poet's blindness to and denial of the darkest aspects of the country that is his chosen theme.

Allan Ginsberg emerged from the Thoreau-Whitman-Williams tradition howling with the junkies in naked city streets, writing about war, greed, sex and hatred as well as their transcendence. Time will tell if his work will hold up, but Ginsberg did truly render America’s darkness as he experienced it, in demotic American speech, as he learned to do from older poets in our homegrown tradition. Whitman wrote about the civil war dead, Williams about sick babies suffering in poverty.

There may not be a Starbucks in Kooser’s rurual hometown, but there are killers, junkies, racists, homophobes, crooked politicians and maybe a sleeper cell. And most probably a developer revving up his cement mixers, ready to cover the plains with malls and parking lots. By eliminating the darkest darks from his palette Kooser brings his work a step closer to being the textual equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting -- not bad, but lacking the transcending bravery that enters the heart of darkness and emerges with reverence intact.

Diana Manister is a member of the American Branch of the International Critics Association (AICA). A former editor of Women Artists News and Artview Magazine, she currently reviews visual art for www.artezine.com as well as poetry for About.com and the Small Press Exchange. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in many print and online literary publications including Waterworks and www.NYCBigCityLit.com, and her poetry has been anthologized in Distance From the Tree and The Company We Keep.

She was one of ten winners of the Lyric Recovery Festival in 2000, selected by Dana Goia and read her work at the 2000 Festival at Carnegie Hall. This review originally appeard at About.com