Ted Kooser is a true American treasure. Hailing from the mid-West, Kooser is a former vice president of a life insurance company who is now the U.S. Poet Laureate and a visiting professor in the English department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Kooser's work is spare, but not simple. His work bridges the distance between life's larger questions and its minutiae of day-to-day life. One World at a Time is Kooser's fifth volume of poetry. Kooser delights in finding the "lesson" in everyday occurrences, as in the poem "Tillage Marks":
On this flat stone,
too heavy for one man alone
to pick up and carry
to the edge of his field,
are the faint white marks
of a plow, one plow
or many, the sharp blade
crisscrossing its face
like a lesson scratched there
in chalk, the same lesson
taught over and over,
to one man alone in his field
for fifty or sixty years,
or to fifty such men,
each alone, each plow striking
this stone, in this field
which he thought to be his.
Family and friends are also rich resources for making emotional connections, as in these lines from "The Witness" where one friend sits as witness at another's divorce hearing:
In your lap, where you left them, your hands
lie fallen apart like the rinds of a fruit.
Whatever they cupped has been eaten away.
Kooser is a meek and humble poet whose manner -- even when reading to an audience at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC -- tries not to draw attention to himself. He lets his poems speak for themselves, which they do so eloquently, delighting in their clarity of purpose.
Kooser's ultimate reader, according to one of his poems (not in this collection), is the woman who picks up his book, reads a poem glorifying the importance of beauty in one's life, and who decides to spend her money not on the book of poetry, but on a new coat to replace her shabby old one.
This is Kooser's goal to show people the importance of even the merest of objects around them. His poems are poems of gratitude for the simple gifts life gives us.
