Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser

ISNB: 1556592019

Reviewed by Rumit Pancholi

Seeing the World Through a Different Lens

It is no surprise that Ted Kooser’s Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004) earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2004. Why? Because, divided into four parts, Delights & Shadows demonstrates the possibility of producing effective poems through clarity of language and vividness of original images. Not only that, Kooser also speaks in an accessible language on familiar things that we often overlook. Furthermore, he delights us by drawing a meaningful conclusion, seeking to enable us to perceive the world from a radically different and unexplored perspective.

Kooser is a consistently humble poet; in his earlier works, he has sustained the role of quiet observer or participant; he has carried this role over to Delights & Shadows. He realizes that he is, after all, only one in a large population of humans in this world. Very few poets come to this realization; Kooser, actually, adheres strictly to it. Kooser writes with careful consideration of his placement in a constantly-active world, taking time to stop, slow down, and take in his surroundings.

Indeed, “stopping” or more precisely, “slowing down”, to take in one’s surroundings is certainly a major theme in Delights & Shadows. Kooser closely focuses on this theme in the entire first section entitled, Walking on Tiptoe. This title suggests his concentration on careful movements as a driving force in the section. After all, the implication of “walking on tiptoe” is that the speaker is observing his surroundings without entering or altering it. Take, for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” a poem that conveys the speaker’s observation of two women escorting another woman down a hallway. In it, Kooser shares his experience of watching these women’s movements, and from them, constructing a reality of their relationship to one another, their conversation, and their dispositions. When he acknowledges, “There is no restlessness or impatience / or anger anywhere in sight. Grace / fills the clean mold of this moment / and all the shuffling magazines grow still” (p.7, l.15-17), Kooser slows down to take in the scene and constructs his own reality of it, like many good poets. However, he takes it step forward. He takes pleasure in the calm, responding not with feelings of sympathy for the woman, but how this scene has changed his surroundings—animating inanimate objects and reacting with purely objective observation. As readers, we understand that if we only slow down, we can find beauty in reality. Despite where we are, Kooser teaches us that if we simply look around and take in our surroundings, we too, can live in a place without “restlessness or impatience or anger.”

In “Mourners,”—another poem in Walking on Tiptoe—Kooser again constructs a reality based on what he observes as he slows down and takes in his surroundings. While the speaker is not a member of the crowd of mourners in the poem, he is the careful observer of their actions and, from these actions, he finds meaning in them. He describes their appearances and their reason for attending the funeral. Then, he sees something that an inattentive onlooker may neglect—an indication of both hope and comfort. As readers, we understand that if we only stop to look at how these mourners interact with one another, we can see the beauty of human consolation. Because this perspective on mourners is radically unlike a conventional one that might simply dismiss them as pitiful, hopeless, and downcast, Kooser enables us to see the world differently by finding something meaningful out of common surroundings.

In Delights and Shadows, Kooser is successful not only in enabling us to view the world from a radically different perspective, but also in pulling us closer to the scene by carefully constructing his surroundings in the poem. Toward the end of each poem, he offers an unexpected turn that makes the reader want to examine the poem as closely as he examines objects. In the poem “Father,” the speaker addresses his father in an ode, speaking hypothetically of what would happen if he were still alive today. While this poem explores for the majority of the poem the speaker’s nostalgia, the turn comes in the last few lines when the speaker returns ownership of the poem to his father. The speaker blurs the line between life and death by acknowledging not just that the father will always be remembered, but how, specifically, he will be. We, as readers, stop to think about how the nostalgic events led to his final assertion. No other poet is able to take an ordinary topic—eulogizing the dead—and unexpectedly turn it.

The language of Ted Kooser’s poetry reminds me of the language of Charles Simic’s poetry, especially that in latter’s The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems. Kooser and Simic have a similar purpose in their poetry: to discover meaning of simple events and objects by entertaining themselves and the reader. The language of both poems is clear and understood by the average person, but an audience—aware of the poet’s intent to discover—can only appreciate the true meaning behind it. This idea of discovery occurs in numerous poems that reveal aspects of the speaker’s life, such as Kooser’s plainspoken It was I and Simic’s The Voice at 3:00 AM. Both seek to discover his own placement in the world and what this discovery means for him—maybe a lifetime of self-denial, a loath to compromise, or even, lasting regret.

Ted Kooser’s collection Delights and Shadows succeeds in his goal of delighting and surprising his readership. It is a must-have collection for all poetry enthusiasts willing to spend a few extra moments on each poem, similar to Kooser’s careful attention to his surroundings and constructing a reality from what he observes. No poet comes close to the clear language and attention that Kooser gives to the objects around him.