Customer Reviews

Flying At Night: Poems 1965-1985 (Pitt Poetry Series)

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Ted Kooser is the poet for the rest of us. Mr. Kooser shuns intellectual poetry, the kind that makes you feel you need an interpreter to understand it. His poems are down-to-earth, rooted in an intense love for the simple pleasures of life. He lives on a farm in Nebraska and his work resonates with images from this rural lifestyle. This was the first book of poetry I willfully sought out and bought since college; reading it has been pure delight.

My daughter's high school has an acronym for certain literature assignments: DHM, deep hidden meaning. If you are weary of DHM, then read Mr. Kooser. DM, no H. He uses Saxon-rooted vocabulary for metaphors so apt, yet stunning, that they stop you short. I will give this book as presents to my best friends.

As I have read poetry in the last six years I have gotten in the habit (not always the best) of either marking the corner of or 'dog-earing' a page with a poem that I like. I've found that I've marked alot of corners in Mr. Kooser's book. I have especially liked his poems that contemplate the somber side of life. I've gone back to "After My Grandmother's Funeral" multiple times to wrestle again, as Kooser does, with the tension between youth and aging...and the realities of death. You'll find yourself doing the same when you read these poems.

Ted Kooser, Flying at Night (University of Pittsburgh, 2005)

For the first quarter of this book, it seemed to me something was missing. I'm still not entirely sure what it was, but then things smoothed out a bit, presumably as Kooser got older (I'm assuming rough chronological order here). From that point on, it's the same sort of stuff Ted Kooser has written for the past thirty-odd years, and it's all quite good:

"Behind each garage a ladder
sleeps in the leaves, its hands
folded across its lean belly.
There are hundreds of them
in each town, and more
sleeping by the haystacks and barns
out in the country-- tough old
day laborers, seasoned and wheezy,
drunk on the weather,
sleeping outside with the crickets."
("Late September")

Kooser has a sense of the simple in language matched by very few living American poets-- Simic, Sadoff, Allbery, a few others. He's pretty much the embodiment of Williams' "no ideas but in things" charge here. An excellent book (for most of its length), and highly recommended. ****

Wonderful! Kooser connects with people through "real life" experiences that are relative to real life. From the abandoned farm littered with past possessions and the stories they tell to watching parents grow older and begin to whither, to everyday happenings, letters, and conversations, Mr. Kooser is able to tell each story with a simple metaphor its own. "Flying at Night" would be a great introduction to poetry, but it is also a collection to be enjoyed and remembered by those who indulge in poetry regularly.

I will confess. I've read so much bad poetry in my life I usually take every opportunity to skip it. In the last decade I have made grudging exceptions, primarily Frost's and Dickinson's works and the obscure and long out of print poems of McKinley Cash, author of "Poems of Our Times", "The Cadence of Living" and "Alabama Folk Testament".

My late discovery of Kooser has come as a pleasant surprise. I mentally classify his work with my favorite prose writers, I think because it evokes the same emotions as (The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine and Illusions.

In "Flying at Night" Kooser reflects the events of the reader's own life. Time and again when you read his poems you catch yourself saying "I saw that, I heard it, I felt that way once". But you forgot it and never would have remembered unless he reminded you. The poems are short, pithy and transparent. In eleven lines he summarizes a man's lifetime of regret over his burned farmhouse, in another thirteen he brings back the carnival of your youth, in a brief seven he says goodbye to Winter.

This is the second of Kooser's books I've bought. It won't be the last.

As a Ted Kooser fan, I found this volume worth my time but not his best.