The Copper Canyon Press Catalog

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Featured Item

Ted Kooser

Delights and Shadows (limited edition)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2005

Listed as a Best Book of 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor

"[Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes that way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can't help but feel significant truths behind his lines."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, Delights & Shadows. Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms...It takes an epigraph from Emily Dickinson–'The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can'–but just as easily could have taken one from Wallace Stevens: 'Death is the mother of beauty.' Mortality is omnipresent and induces a deep attentiveness. Everyone here–a young woman in a wheelchair, a skater dressed in black, a group of mourners after a funeral, the poet himself–seems to be moving lightly over an invisible abyss. 'There are days when the fear of death/ is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates/ everything,' he writes in 'Surviving.' 'Were it not for the way you taught me to look/ at the world, to see the life at play in everything,' he writes to his mother who has been dead just one month, 'I would have to be lonely forever.'"
—Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post

"Delights & Shadows is a book with a deep stillness at its center, perfectly self-contained, yet echoing like a country well. Kooser, recently chose as our new poet laureate, has been writing poems for 30 years. He lives in Nebraska and is a retired life insurance executive. The modesty of the background from which he draws inspiration heightens the poems' ingratiating manner. This is a poet writing in the tradition of Thomas McGrath, without the all-defining politics–though these are poems of the Great Plains–and prairie poems carry with them (as any poet born in this part of America knows) a natural populist gravity and humor."
—Carol Muske-Dukes, The Los Angeles Times

"Kooser's ninth collection of poems reflects the simple and remarkable things of everyday life. That he often sees things we do not would be delight enough, but more amazing is exactly what he sees. Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated. There is much to celebrate in these small-town poems about small-town people and a reminder to all of us how America's voice and warm wisdom resonate from the middle. Highly recommended."
—Library Journal

"Kooser, in essence, takes the Imagist influence on early 20th Century poetry–including Wallace Stevens–back to its realist roots. He gives us poetry that Mark Twain and William Dean Howells would have admired. His poems make us notice our world, make us see more than think....His Delights & Shadows brims with poems that every earnest reader can respond to immediately, even readers who never pick up poetry."
—Ron Smith

"Few poets depict the Midwest so accurately or with such tender regard...Kooser excels at the brief, imagistic poem."
—The Kansas City Star

"Kooser is careful to reject any appeal to the obvious, his technique based on several essential components, including close attention to crucial detail; a precision of language that results in striking, indelible images; and a modest but tangible vision of a cosmos beyond the poem's specific setting."
—Magill's Literary Annual Books of 2004

"Delights & Shadows raises the voice of the poet above everything else. Each short, vivid poem on the page reads as if it were being spoken aloud. Details about cemeteries, dictionaries, a doctor's waiting room, and a jar of buttons bristle with sound and awareness. Kooser's ability to use brief lyrics to compose a music of discovery and regeneration makes his work radiant and consuming....This is not an extended, complex or experimental kind of writing, but poetry that rings true, allowing the human sound of being to exist on the page."
—Bloomsbury Review

"It is beautiful. So very real life people. A joy to read. A treasure I would not part with for any price. I think he has tapped the great American reserve of common sense."
—Henry Redkey, from a "Reader Response" card

"Kooser writes of fathers, flow blue china, cancer clinics, tattoos, starlight, grasshoppers-and so many more of the unnoticed beauties that pry into the cracks of our crowded lives. Reading Ted Kooser is a reorienting experience, one that is a powerful, quiet salve."
—Grady Harp, from a "Reader Response" card

“Here is the gift and fragility of life...”
—Arlice Davenport, Wichita Eagle

“Delights & Shadows could be enjoyed by everyone from the novice reader of poetry to scholars in ivory towers. Good poetry transcends educational boundaries and this is good poetry.”
—Michael G. Howell, The Big Muddy

“Ted Kooser’s Delights & Shadows is a quiet but beautiful song of clarity, like clear, clean water, and the taste is just as pure. Not dense, not academic, it’s accessible and lucid revealing the remarkable with the ordinary.... Kooser knows just the way to form the words, to say something worth saying.... Kooser’s ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift.”
—Robert Baldwin, Bloomsbury Review

“...[a] book filled with poetry that sings of the beauty of the small moments in life.”
—Rebecca Hahn, Clayton County Register

“...without a shadow of a doubt, a delight.... Kooser’s humility and humanity shine through in each of his poems.”
—Mark Austin, The Daily Yomiuri

“Kooser is a master of the subjective description. Empathetic without sentimentality, his eye ranges over all sorts of everyday subjects and finds material everywhere...wherever the unpredictable particularity of the world can be glimpsed.... Perhaps Kooser’s success lies in his determination to see the...things of this world with such clarity and passion that their underlying mysteries, delights, and shadows also become clear, if only for a moment.”
—Jeff Gundy, The Georgia Review

“You can almost see Kooser behind the poems, watching the world like a sketch artist.... These poems resemble watercolors, and there is nothing static in them.... Kooser displays the same kind of fluid strokes Degas used in his ballet pictures.... In one athletic sentence, Kooser...springs us from a crouch and into the sky and brings us back safely.... Kooser’s works inspire voluptuous rumination. He is an exquisite miniaturist of daily life....”
—John Freeman, The Hartford Courant

“The poet finds magic in activities and objects typically considered mundane.... Metaphors are the treasure of these short, imagistic poems, emphasizing the wonder and delight latent in what is often merely taken for granted.”
—Jeffrey Galbraith, Harvard Review

“Pick a poem—any poem—by Ted Kooser, and see how the ordinary ornaments our lives.... Kooser’s poetry reminds the reader that life’s true reality lurks just below the surface of our five senses.... The 60 poems in this...book take pains to soothe the reader with the beauty of all that can be taken for granted.... Poetry in Kooser’s hands can be found everywhere and speaks to everyone without any need of explanations.”
—Charles H. Johnson, The Home News Tribune

“That [Kooser] often sees things we do not would be delight enough, but more amazing is exactly what he sees. Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated. There is much to celebrate in these small-town poems about small-town people and a reminder to all of us how America’s voice and warm wisdom resonate from the middle. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal

“Kooser really looks at things and tells you what you’re missing. He is moved to capture the subtle beauties of life.... Kooser’s poetry looks inside and shows us what we’re missing.... Delights & Shadows is an American treasure; poems that are rich with history, voice and soul.”
—Jim Reese, Lincoln Journal-Star

“A sense of wonder and compassion runs through this Pulitzer Prize winning volume.... Kooser’s poetry is understated yet manages to skillfully illuminate the small moments of life.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“Ted Kooser casts poetic contrasts and comparisons in Delights & Shadows, creating novel revelations in the ordinary.”
—Linda Piwowarczyk, Naperville Sun

“Ted Kooser is...living proof that poetry does not have to be obscure and difficult to avoid being ordinary and cliched.... He says more in a few clipped lines than most writers do in pages of dense prose.”
—Nebraska Life

“Ted Kooser writes poems that are slices of life studded with poignant observations.”
—Susan Flansburg, Quad-City Times

“Kooser [has] spent his entire writing career working toward clarity, and in Delights & Shadows he achieves it wonderfully.... He soothes the reader with his lucidity.... Kooser’s ability to bring out the beauty in simple things draws you in.”
—Jeremy Schnitker, The Reader

“The poems in Delights & Shadows deftly accumulate into a textured and tender picture of the everyday world.”
—Agatha Beins, Redactions

“In his tenth poetry collection, Delights & Shadows, Kooser transforms ordinary encounters—garage sales, washing hands, preparing a meal—into unforgettable moments where the poet’s eye captures reality and a little more. In these simple pleasures Kooser finds both tragedy and triumph, simplicity and complexity, the explanation and the mystery. Kooser believes that if you watch a thing long enough, tilt it on its side, find a new perspective, something amazing will appear: that laser epiphany which pierces the poet’s heart.... Kooser uses the familiar to draw the reader into an era gone by or a common history that binds us. Kooser shows us new ways of looking at things we thought we knew.... Kooser’s poems are at their best in a direct observation of people.... With or without the mantle of poet laureate, Kooser can confidently takes his place among America’s finest poets, elevating the craft by using the kind of language we can all relate to while conjuring images we never thought possible.”
—Michael Beadle, Smokey Mountain News

“I have always believed that true poetry is not meant to confound but to surprise. It is a gift to read a poem that interrupts my commonplace day and jolts me awake. Ted Kooser...has written such a volume, Delights & Shadows.... He writes about the ordinary and makes it extraordinary, gracious and graceful.”
—Sunday Eagle Tribune

"Small, subtle haiku-like imagistic impressions of the salient and often overlooked details of the everyday.... revealing the remarkable in the ordinary."
—Neon