The Life and Poetry of Ted Kooser
Born and raised in Ames, Iowa; summering with his grandparents in Guttenberg, Iowa, as a boy; living in and around Lincoln, Nebraska, since 1963; and disliking long-distance travel, Kooser is a quintessential poet of place. He writes without chauvinism or defensiveness about the lives and happenings of his place, so vividly yet thoughtfully that they and their significance appear as distinctly as if his writing were investigative photography or realist painting (of course, Kooser also paints and photographs). Stillwell shows us that that effect of Kooser’s poems is the result of a prosody as carefully cultivated as that of any fine poet. As she unfolds the events of Kooser’s ordinary life, she examines each of his collections and his few, short prose books to disclose the large aim of his writing, which is to demonstrate and affirm the interconnectedness of people and their natural contexts. It’s a concern that echoes Wordsworth’s, and it produces work that is as considerable, though as different as the plains are from the Lake District. --Ray Olson