Ted KooserAnmeldelser

Beautiful, reflective story about the passing of time. Will be appreciated more by adults than children, however my 7 year old read it and really enjoyed it. Gorgeous illustrations. I loved it!

Very helpful as a general introduction to the art of writing poetry for everyone. However, if you are looking for an extensive guide to poetry styles and rules, look somewhere else. Kooser says himself the goal is not to write a "rule book" for poetry- his goal is to give understandable advice for whatever type of poetry you choose to write.

Personally, I found this sort of quiet and dull overall. I read it immediately after reading [b:Emile and the Field|58496713|Emile and the Field|Kevin Young|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1629120236l/58496713._SX50_.jpg|91866951] and I think it suffered in comparison. Whereas Emile has a musicality and seems to speak directly to children, I thought the poems in Mashmallow Clouds were clunky to read aloud, and most didn't feel like they'd have much child appeal.

There are a few poems in this collection that I appreciated. I liked "Remote" and "Cow Pie" which are among the few funny poems in the book. I also liked "Trees" ("Growing up for a tree / is mostly reaching out and out to touch another, / and that's enough of a life.") because it reminded me of a scene in the movie C'mon C'mon where this little boy is so excited to talk about how trees communicate with each other.

The subtitle (Two Poets at Play among Figures of Speech) made me think these poems would be exploring well-known figures of speech in a playful way, but that's not what's going on here. It would be more accurate to say this is Two Poets Making Observations Using Figurative Language.

fun - try this on Roman

Wonderful artwork to go along with poems, kids will enjoy creating their own! My favorites were The World Without Me, Flyswatter, and Thunderstorm.

Yet another book I read (in this take home library batch) that had potential and yet disappointed me. There were too many words and as I lost interest, I can only imagine a child doing so.

It was the message of the grass not being greener somewhere else. So a great message, right? And it is illustrated/told in a fun way of Mr. Posey trying on new pairs of glasses that, in turn, took him to all different worlds.

Still, due to its lack of readability, I had to give it a lower rating than I would have liked

Poets . . . Why'd It Have to be Poets?

I'm not a fan of poetry on the best of days,
and this is not the best of days,
and these are not the best of poems.
They couldn't even afford to buy a rhyme,
the poor fucks.

(Poetry lesson: Write your review like normal, capitalize the first line, then hit return every couple of inches or whenever you come to punctuation (capitalizing the first letter of the next line is optional), and -- ta-da! -- you've written poetry. Now post it online and ruin other people's day the same way yours has been ruined.)

(Another project! I'm trying to read all the picture books and graphic novels on the kids section of NPR's Books We Love 2022.)

A lovely, playful, contemplative collection of poems and illustrations in four sections (Fire, Water, Air, Earth).

"...but my friend
who always sees things as they are
told me no..." (from "A Disappointment"

"Each hour of sleep is an hour of healing." (first line of "Sleep")

"Deep in the night, a frightening dream
tried my door, and I called out for help,
my voice all alone in the silence.
The moon showed up almost at once,
wearing its white latex gloves, and dusted
the doorknob for prints and checked
all the windows for damage." (from "A Bad Dream")

"Growing up for a tree
is mostly reaching out and out to touch another,
and that's enough of a life." (from "Trees")

See also: Out of Wonder: Celebrating Poets and Poetry by Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderley, Marjory Wentworth, and Ekua Holmes; Firefly July by Paul Janeczko and Melissa Sweet

this is a collaboration between Harrison and Ted Kooser, and whether or not you like the works of either of these authors, "Creek" is a kind of miracle. None of the brief poems are attributed to either man; they say that the poems were truly jointly constructed. A casual vivid elegance graces the book, and in the poems time is real.

Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate (2004-2006), is a poet who works toward clarity and accessibility, so that each distinctive poem appears to be as fresh and bright and spontaneous as a good watercolor painting. He imbues his poems with "tender wisdom,” and draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life.

Ted Kooser is a very accessible poet—in all the best ways that term can be interpreted. As The Bloomsbury Review put it, “Kooser’s ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift.” In the 230 pages of this new and selected collection, about 60 pages are new poems. That balance is something I always check in these collections—yet in my current state of having most of his books packed away in my storage unit—I’m happy to have new as well as old Kooser poetry.
If you’ve never read him, this collection would be a great introduction to his fine, fine poetry. The natural world and many of its feathered and fur-covered inhabitants are living all through his work. He has such a superb and subtle touch in his poems, as well as getting to the heart of what makes us humans tick. His language is mostly from the everyday, but he is a master of creating beauty out of the familiar. You may never have lived on the Great Plains, but his work operates in a very common and comfortable world that seems familiar to most everyone. He doesn’t reach beyond his grasp, doesn’t pack too much into his poetry, but I always love the mood he creates by simply placing his well-thought words around a page.

Allow me to share just a few lines of his poetry that impressed me.

“A Finding”
One of our dogs has brought the foreleg of a deer
up from the bottom woods, and gnawed on it awhile,
and left it next to the door like a long-stemmed rose,
___

“Shoes”
In the shoe store storage closet,
the smooth brown eggs of new shoes
lie glowing in boxes
___

“November 9”
Rainy and cold.
The sky hangs thin and wet on its clothesline.
___

“March 20”
The vernal equinox.
How important it must be
to someone
that I am alive, and walking,
and that I have written
these poems.
This morning the sun stood
right at the end of the road
and waited for me.
___

Okay, okay, I love his honest style, and being without most of my own Kooser books, I’m thrilled to have some of his very best poetry resting in my hands and now in my head.

__________

SECOND READING

Last night, a little before midnight, I got into bed, and tried to start a new book. There was Miller’s classic, Tropic of Cancer; a fairly new hardcover, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan; and the big Dylan book, The Double Life of Bob Dylan; but none of them worked for me. I tried to go to sleep, but that didn’t work either. I tossed and turned, thinking about how I was right where I watched my late wife take her last breath in our bed. I looked up the wall and saw the sign that I created for our first bookstore, Mansion Book Merchants, back in 1987. With the lights out, it was only the moonlight that illuminated those nine letters, BOOKSTORE. That simple sign defined all five of our bookstores for twenty-two years, and now it watches over me alone in this room.

Once it became apparent that I must read, I spied Ted Kooser’s collection Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems, sitting beside the bed. It was right where I’d dropped it after finishing it ten days ago. I love how I effortlessly connect with his poetry. Reading the book the first time had been such a pleasure, but in the first two hours of this day, it was near perfection. I was completely “in the zone” with Ted. I knew where he was coming from with most every line. I found myself feeling every poem and I could find no fault. My eyes had been killing me when I’d started reading, but soon I couldn’t stop myself. The way the lines worked together was magical. The smallest subtlety of a line brought many smiles to my face. He writes of familiar objects, animals, and types of people, and they always carry such comforting resonance in his poetry.

The following poem always gets to me. To me it is not about an old woman who requires help, it’s about the beauty of connection, about the love and kindness between this couple. It’s about the beauty of that last line.

"Splitting an Order"

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,
observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he had asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

It always makes me think of how my wife loved to get a booth in a restaurant, and have us sit beside each other on the same side of the table. It epitomized my line about a long love, “Lean on Me, Lean on You.” We would kid each other, whisper and laugh, kiss and caress. If you see me now, an old widower, sitting in a booth with a sad look in my eye ... it is all about the enormous empty space beside me.

I could easily go through this entire book and find so many groupings of lines in each poem, lines that fit so perfectly together, that evoke so many feelings. I apologize, for this isn’t the most descriptive of reviews, but it’s hard to position the words to describe such a magical reading experience. I hope you find your own magical time. To quote myself in finishing off many of our bookstore’s communications, “Read On.”½

I loved this collection. These poems were very accessible, rang true, and seemed to be so much a part of many people’s lives. He had not published a book for ten years, since he had won the Pulitzer Prize with Delights & Shadows. In a review on Rumpus.net there was the following line. “I am drawn to Kooser’s poems, in part, because they are radically and unapologetically sincere.’’ He describes the objects we see every day in such a way that his readers see and appreciate them in a different way. Whenever I read some of his poetry, I always come away with the feeling that so many people need more Ted Kooser in their lives. Read some, your life will be richer.

More than 30 years ago, Dana Gioia asked Can Poetry Matter? in a book-length monograph of the same name. Ted Kooser's Kindest Regards answers with a resounding "yes!"

Critics have described Kooser as "accessible"--which can be interpreted as high praise or sugar-coated deleteriousness. It is an accurate statement, but only in the way that some music has a veneer of accessibility that can obscure an underlying complexity. If Kooser is accessible, he is not shallow.

One of my favorite poems in this collection (and apparently I'm not alone, as it appears on the dust jacket) is "Hoarfrost:"

Two days of an icy prairie fog
and every blade of grass, and twig,
and branch, and every stretch
of wire, barb, post and staple,
is a knot or a thread in a lace
of the purest white. To walk
is like finding your way
through a wedding dress, the sky
inside it cold and satiny;
no past, no future, just the now
all breathless. Then a red bird,
like a pinprick, changes everything.

Somerset Maugham said it best: "to write simply is as difficult as to be good." In just 12 concise lines, Kooser creates a midwestern winter vision where everything is indeed changed by the appearance of the most natural of things--a small bird in a bucolic scene. In a study of contrasts, Kooser has created a powerful, beautiful mental image that is radically altered by this simple action. It is a metaphor of life.

Kooser finds wonder in the ordinary, as evidenced by many of his poems' titles: "An Old Photograph", "Five P.M.", "The Fan in the Window", "Shoes", and "Road Kill" to name a few. Readers will find fresh perspectives and elegant imagery in each. While Kooser's poems are rich in language, they do lack in meter and rhythm. If these elements are intrinsic to poetry, then Kooser's words are more "brief artistic observations." This is a common difference between contemporary and "classical" poetry; a Petrarchan sonnet is about as interesting to some as representational art. Even with this small criticism, Kindest Regards is well worth the read.

I tagged with my "depressing" tag but I don't think it's depressing so much as melancholy. I loved the illustrations, obviously, because I love Jon Klassen to bits and his illustrations really capture melancholy quite well. The story didn't quite do it for me - a house's people all move away and then house gets pushed up to the sky by the trees all growing around it. It paints a beautiful picture, but it personally didn't touch my heart so much. Maybe it was because, in this library copy I read, some monster underlined a bunch of words in PEN.

This book is pitched at about the undergraduate creative writing class level, which I think fills a gap in what's out there. He has clearly heard a lot of questions from the kind of intelligent students who have just started thinking about what the business of poetry is about, really, and who think they might have something to say but need some orientation on what the important things to concentrate upon might be, and he supplies both advice and illustrations without pretense or condescension. He has also read more than his shore of subpar verse and outright bad doggerel and does not refrain from teaching through these. I don't think I've seen anyone else do anything quite like that in any book of literary criticism before, despite its effectiveness. Mainly, he writes as someone who has found the pleasure of composing poetry and would just like to address writers who might enjoy that on their own, with matters of prestige or money or fame pushed into the background. Kooser quotes not only his own poems but also those of his favorite writers, and even an occasional piece of creative prose as illustrations of the points he makes.
As US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser has had a well-deserved reputation for bringing poetry to more readers. He acknowledges the fear and dread that many people have when confronted with a poem they do not know, and has put together an admirable piece of instruction to counteract this bias.

A correspondence in short poems between the authors. Lovely and very discouraging, because it makes me feel old and terribly mortal.

Simply one of the most beautifully written books I have read.

A young boy and girl move into a house with their father. The house is surrounded by grass, but on the edges all around is the forest. The children love the forest, but their father never joins them. He just mows his lawn. Ted Kooser's poetry/prose combined with exquisite illustrations by Jon Klassen make this a classic.

Beautifully written prose. Kooser is a master of language.

This book showed the growth of a family but also the growth of trees in the family. Ted Kooser did an amazing job writing a story about a father and the desire to keep his house and lawn perfect for his family. When his family grew up and moved away, it was time for the trees to take over and keep the house safe in their branches and growth. Jon Klassen's illustrations are full of different colors and straight smooth lines at the beginning of the story. Towards the end of the book, Klassen's illustrations are more blended with the background and flow together. Klassen still does not use bright bold colors and lines in any part of the book, just like all of the previous books of his I have read. The subtle and calming style he uses is what makes his artwork unique and fits well with the story Ted Kooser has written.½

He has a way of describing simple things, particularly in nature, where instead of adverbs and adjectives he makes up stories about them. He does it so skillfully that it seems like he's hearing the stories and not telling them. I have a book of his earlier poems and they're quite good, but these are really fine. My only quibble with these poems is I wish there were more of them.

A quietly brilliant collection.

Ted Kooser's Delights & Shadows is one of those rare volumes where I wish I had written nearly every poem within. With few exceptions, each poem has just the right imagery and just the right, quiet word to explode like a milkweed pod into a fertility of grace and meaning.

Poems about everyday life written by the United States Poet Laureate.

Beautifully illustrated, this story from poet Ted Kooser is a two edged coin. From one point of view it's about nature surviving and reclaiming the land when man leaves. But it's also about a father unable to stop the passage of time and has to watch his children leave and finally being unable to hold onto the family home. Perhaps more for slightly older children. And adults who love Jon Klassen's art work - of which I imagine there are many.

Beautiful illustrations with a great story by a wonderful poet.