~GILBERT PURDY~
TED
KOOSER: DELIGHTS
& SHADOWS
Ted
Kooser has been compared to Robert Frost
for just this reason: he
writes about a regional
landscape and a way of life that is passing
away.
He writes about it after a fashion that seems
particularly
suited to his subject. The short poems
of this volume, and the
lack of dialogue, suggest
a laconic people. The details are common
but also
somehow characteristic of the small, midwestern
farming town.
In
the title essay of Guy Davenportís book The Geography of the
Imagination the author considers Grant Wood's painting American
Gothic. The location was Eldon, Iowa. The
artist's sister and dentist were the models for the husband
(with his famous pitchfork) and wife. The house behind them was
a balloon frame house, invented in the early 19th century and
commonplace on the American prairie by the 1880s. The balloon
frame house was framed with 2x4s rather than heavy custom cut
timbers. Much of the household purchasing in the sprawling,
sparsely populated midwest was done by mail order, and, by the
1890s, standardized balloon frame construction kits could be
purchased through mail order and shipped to site by
train. Hundreds of floor plans, from gingerbread Victorian to
neo-Classical, were available.
The windows in the house, Davenport reminds
the reader, were invented
centuries before in Venice, Italy, and later perfected for colder
climates in England. The pair wears clothing made from materials
also distributed by mail order houses:
The
train that brought her clothes — paper pattern, bolt
cloth,
needle, thread, scissors — also brought her husband's
bib
overalls, which were originally, in the 1870s, trainmen's
workclothes
designed in Europe, manufactured here for J. C.
Penny, and
disseminated across the United States as the railroads
connected city
with city. The cloth is denim, from Nömes
in France,
introduced by Levi Strauss of blue jean fame.
The design can
be
traced to no less a person than Herbert
Spencer, who
thought he was
creating a utilitarian one-piece
suit for
everybody to wear.
The hieratic pose has its inception in ancient Egypt where
the
pitchfork was originally a flail. The American Gothic of 1929, it
seems, was made up of a mixture of influences, few of which were
midwestern and none of which were gothic.
Much
the same may be said of Ted Kooser's Delights
&
Shadows. Wood's farmers were not the farmers of two
generations
before. As simple, sturdy and unaffected as they look on the
surface, their simplicity had begun to be eroded, invaded. For all
the wonder of their new purchasing power, they were just about to
undergo the Great Depression. The decline of the family farm, and
the lifestyle that went with it, was already irreversibly underway.
Kooser's Nebraskans are quietly
diverse. There is a
Vietnamese café in town. There are yard sales attended by
an aging biker with a tattoo:
A
dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering
heart . . . .
What is so attractive about them,
however — putting the
author's obvious affection for them, for the moment, aside — is their
sense of being holdovers from a more solid, less
frenzied time. Perhaps the best poem in the volume is about "A
Jar of Buttons." Today we are no longer in the
habit of keeping jars of buttons even on the Great
Plains. Generally, working mothers no longer have the time or
inclination to sew them back on. Delights
& Shadows portrays
the passing of a way of life.
Ted
Kooser has been compared to Robert Frost for just this reason: he
writes about a regional landscape and a way of life that is passing
away. He writes about it after a fashion that seems particularly
suited to his subject. The short poems of this volume, and the
lack of dialogue, suggest a laconic people. The details are common
but also somehow characteristic of the small, midwestern farming town.
In
the poem "Pearl" — the poem most mindful of
Frost's North of Boston — the
poet has traveled to
Elkander, Iowa:
a
hundred miles to tell our cousin, Pearl,
that her
childhood playmate, Vera, my mother,
had died.
The simple detail of "the door / with its lace-covered oval
of
glass" is all the description needed to erect the house in the
reader's mind. When he calls out "It's
Vera's boy," we are immediately taken back to the land of American Gothic.
Everyone is so filled with being themselves these
days.
It
is a world of small details. The poems of Delights & Shadows
are filled with them: the kind of observations that belonged to a less
harried time. The reader must slow to an unaccustomed pace when
faced by poems such as "A Washing of Hands":
She
turned on the tap and a silver braid
unraveled over
her fingers.
She cupped them,
weighing that tassel,
first in one
hand and then the other,
then pinching
through the threads
as if searching
for something . . . .
So many of the poems go with titles
such as "Dishwater," "Applesauce," and "Casting Reels." The
titles are properly descriptive of what the reader will find: ordinary
scenes recalled lingeringly in their material objects.
In
the poem "Cosmetics Department," on the other hand, two
young women try on beauty in an immediately contemporary scene. In
"A Rainy Morning":
A
young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black
nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing
herself through the morning.
Perhaps her matter-of-fact deftness comes from another time,
but the
scene is wholly contemporary. In the poem "Lobocraspis
griseifusa" — the title the Latin name of the moth the
poem describes — the poet achieves a timeless and place-less
grace.
Pearl
heats up a pan of water and makes instant coffee. She and Ted talk
quietly. She recalls a memory of herself and his mother when they
were little girls. Then, as if it was just another topic of
conversation:
"I've
had
some trouble
with health myself," she said,
taking off her
glasses and wiping them,
and I said she
looked good, though, and she said,
"I've started
seeing people who aren't here.
I know they're
not real but I see them the same.
They come in the
house and sit around
and never say a
word. . . ."
It is one of the many quietly human moments in Delights &
Shadows. Writing simply is supremely difficult and Ted
Kooser does
it well.
Kooser, Ted. Delights
& Shadows. Port Townsend,
WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004. ISBN 1-55659-201-9 $15.00
© by Gilbert Purdy
