Delicious tidbits of observation

books:

	• Winter Morning Walks : 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Poetry Series) Ted Kooser Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2001 - 120 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

His Best

Out of the many excellent books that Ted Kooser has written, for my money this is the best. Written while recovering from cancer its reflections of before sunrise walks are his most deeply personal. It is a book that should be shared with all those who struggle with cancer. Ted deserves to be held up as one of the greatest poets that America has ever produced.

To Know That We Are Not Alone

This book, by our current Poet Laureate, is as fine a book of modern poetry as you can hope for. During his treatment for cancer, the author is given medication that makes his skin sun-sensitive. So, in order to maintain his daily habit of walking the country roads of Nebraska for exercise, he has to do it before the sun comes up. To allay the inherent loneliness, he decides to send a friend, Jim Harrison, a poem on a postcard everyday. So, in the company of one of his dogs, plenty of different birds, and a keenly inquisitive mind to which nothing is ordinary and everything informs on everything else, this book was born. I usually read such a book in less than a week, marking the more effective poems in the table for contents for when I return. I couldn't shake this one for three weeks, and I read and read each of them poems three and four times before moving on to the next. It's winter in New England; that may be part of it. And the grey dawn hand of mortality has overshadowed me for the last few months as well. But neither is real reason I kept this faithful book with me; fundamentally, it's just a good book. Look past that startlingly honest title and start reading. You won't regret it. C. S. Lewis quoted a student, who quoted his father, saying, "We read to know that we are not alone." If every a book does that, this does.

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Winter postcards form Nebraska

Spanning from Nov 9 to the first day of spring, these short, direct poems all reflect a pre-dawn walk in Nebraska "beneath a billion indifferent stars". A short statement of the weather (for example, "two degrees and clear" on December 30) is followed by a short poem influenced by what he saw on his walk. ("Older this morning, the moon / hid most of her face / behind a round gray mirror").

The poems sometimes reflect different shades of darkness, from "a deer of gray vapor" to "a rutted black field". The poems are set within his recovery from cancer "Lucky I am to go off to my cancer appointment having been given a bluebird")

I read each of the poems on the same date they were written, which provided a personal contrast. As a postcard collector, I would love to receive one of these poems on a postcard.

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A master poet, intimate moments

Kooser is a master, but this collection of his postcard poems to a friend during cancer recovery is very powerful. An intimite glimpse at despair and hope all mixed up with the wonder of winter mornings. Easy to see why he's been the US Poet Laureate.

Delicious tidbits of observation

Ted Kooser manages to eloquently describe the world around him without ever being puffed up, aluding to obscure classics or requiring PhD research. This volume is just a wonderful, accessable group of poetic morsels that go down smoothly and leave you hungering for more.

reviews: page 1, 2

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