Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems by Ted Kooser (review)

In an American Poet essay, James Galvin, discussing James Wright, wrote, "the poet of place situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it. Poetry of place is actually a poetry of displacement and self-annihilation." Enabled by a poet keenly tuned to his or her familiar surroundings, apprehending in them something essential to the human condition, the poetry of place becomes paradoxically universal.

Ted Kooser is a poet of place, not because of anything we learn about his locus, but because of our injured, ephemeral selves we encounter through his enlarging observations that transcend Nebraska, where he lives and the setting of many of his poems. The encounters are more so disquieting because of how stealthily they encroach on our sense of rootedness and calm through unassuming idiom in poems that, often building from lists of images, barely insinuate their gravity—until they surprise us with it. "In the cold blue shadow behind a deck," begins "Deep Winter," "among young ash and mulberry trees,"

standing in discarded tires, and next toa roll of used and reused sheep wireand a sheaf of rust posts, I am aloneamong the others who have stood here

Amid suburban detritus, in an inconspicuous turn from the first to the third person, Kooser sees "all of us / having come …"

to look for something to use to propup something else, or for a partof a part, and not having found it,standing both inside and outside of time,becoming a piece of some great rusty workwe seem to fit exactly.

Junkyard becomes something ecclesiastical: the "all of us" among decaying objects "look[ing] for something" to "prop / up something else," with attendant allusions to vanity ("becoming a piece of some great rusty work") and preordinance ("we seem to fit exactly"), while new life ("young … trees") blossoms.

Kooser's appreciation of divine edict is playfully treated in "Weather Central," where the Godlike weatherman on TV "cautiously smooths and strokes the massive, dappled flank / of the continent"; "then, with a horsefly's touch,"

he brushes a mountain range and sets a shudderrunning just under the skin. His bearingis cavalier from years of success and he laughsat the science, yet makes no sudden movesthat might startle the splendid orderor loosen the physics….

Inquiring and droll, joyful and wistful, Kooser's speakers, consistently compassionate and adept at transforming image into metaphor, guide us through five decades of the poet's work in Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), from 1980's Sure Signs to a generous offering of newer poems.

Despite the humor and wit, man's existential isolation pervades the collection. In "An Old Photograph," a married couple in their sixties assert their separateness after more than a quarter century of wedlock, three decades to go. This duality of being alone while being with others, and of "standing both inside and outside of time," is echoed in "January 17": "Some mornings, very early, I put on / my dead father's brown corduroy robe, / more than twenty years old," "and walk through the house with my father, groping our way / through the chilly, darkened rooms, …"

and feeling on our outstretched fingers,despite the familiar order of each room,despite the warmth of women sleeping near,the breath of emptiness.

Around a domestic sanctuary, perceptible to the imagination navigating the house ghost-like, flanking the premonitory "chilly, darkened rooms," looms a void. While the boundary between man and nature is breached in The Blizzard Voices monologues, it is negotiated in other poems, such as "Weather Central." In "The Constellation Orion," the poet, driving at night, son asleep in the car, thinks: "If he were awake, he'd say, 'Look, Daddy, there's Old Ryan!' / but I won't wake him."

He's mine for the weekend,Old Ryan, not yours.

Observation without and introspection within complement each other in the poems. In "A Letter in October," Kooser notes the shortening days and nature's diminishing...