Sunday, June 16, 2019

Delights and shadows, by Ted Kooser


This book by Nebraskan Ted Kooser won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and what a delight it is.  For whatever reason, Kooser came to read at our library and I have a signed copy of this book.  It was wonderful to revisit it almost fifteen years later.  He is both “accessible” and deep, with simple language and short lyrics freighted with meaning.  Here’s a favorite:  

Gyroscope
By Ted Kooser

I place this within the first order
of wonders: a ten-year-old girl
alone on a sunny, glassed-in porch
in February, the world beyond
the windows slowly tipping forward
into spring, her thin arms held out
in the sleepwalker pose, and pinched
and stretched between her fingers,
a length of common grocery twine
upon which smoothly spins and leans
one of the smaller worlds we each
at one time learn to master, the last
to balance so lightly in our hands.
96 pp.

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