Review by New York Times Review
Over 22 years, Ted Kooser has sent poetic valentines to thousands of women. EVERY Feb. 14 since 1986, Ted Kooser - former poet laureate and self-described "harmless geezer" - has attached a Valentine's Day poem to a postcard and sent it off to a mailing list of favored ladies. The recipients were mostly his friends' wives (his own didn't mind, he says), but over the years the list expanded to some 2,500 women. To this critic, it all sounded more than a little problematic: there's a fine line, in poetry as in life, between harmless geezer and multitasking player. Besides, who wants a valentine stained with 2,500 thumbprints? I do, it turns out. Because while Kooser's wry, homespun valentines may not suit every poetry lover's taste - too sentimental for some, too straightforward for others - they are also perversely disarming, a trail of daisies leading to the bedroom door. Over 22 years, Kooser has discovered a startling variety of ways to invert and enliven the vocabulary of romance, finding tender implications in even the mustiest Valentine's symbols. In "If You Feel Sorry," he observes with compassion even "the dozens of little paper poppies" abandoned in a heart-shaped candy box "without so much as a single finger/to scrabble around in their/crinkled petals, not even/one pimpled nose to root and snort/through their delicate pot pourri." In the spare Nebraska landscape around him, Kooser finds hearts everywhere. In one poem it's a noble celery heart, in another a heart-shaped map, in yet another a barn owl's "white heart woven of snowy feathers." There's also "an old beer bottle/with a heart of gold"; the "scorched yet ever shining heart" of a libidinous ironing board; and even hoof-marked oak leaves that scatter like valentines before the beloved, "dark red/like the deep-running, veinous blood/of the married, returning/again and again to the steady heart." Most of Kooser's odes do what Valentine's poems have always done: they offer love. Sometimes this offering is passionate, but more often it features a kind of stylized longing from afar - a mournful, gentlemanly and calculated wooing. This can involve gifts of poetry, as in "Pocket Poem," in which "little gifts of loneliness come wrapped/by nervous fingers," or in "This Paper Boat," where the speaker implores, "if you find it/caught in the reeds, its message blurred,/the thought that you are holding it/a moment is enough for me." Or it can involve magical gifts, as in "The Bluet," where he offers "whole fields/of wild perfume." In "Tracks," he even builds a pair of "red valentine shoes/with heart-shaped wooden heels" and tells his beloved, "Look for my tracks on your doorstep/where I stood with sore feet/through the evening, too timid to knock." Yet some of the best poems here have the slenderest link to literal love, like the spooky and evocative "New Potato": As with much romantic poetry, the real subject here is time which destroys beauty and turns the sweetest kiss into a memory. Kooser makes his geezerness an explicit element of poetic persona, noting his "old man's chest" and "pigeon shoulders," and, in a late poem, doing a dark and witty critique of his own "myth of myself" as aging "Mariachi me." But when it comes to his beloved(s), Kooser has generous eyes, offering always to keep her young even if that means standing on a kitchen stool and literally holding back the hands of a clock. Despite the dark streaks in these meditations, Kooser's poems stubbornly insist upon the glory of such mortal transitions, as in the lovely "Skater," in which Kooser describes his subject performing a difficult leap, then "skating backward right out of that moment, smiling back/at the woman she'd been just an instant before." There's little literal sex here. The naughtiest poem features the aforementioned ironing board, and while it's actually quite steamy ("I gave till my legs shook, but then/they were up and away"), it's an outlier. But as a series, Kooser's poems do build a frisson, making the most of small moments of intimacy: that bottle of beer, standing in for a lover's mouth, a sandwich cut and shared between an elderly couple. The final poem - the only new one in the collection - is the strangest of the bunch, a dark little ditty addressed to the wife who tolerated all these postcards, and it suggests beneath Kooser's "Mariachi me" someone a bit more complicated, an animal at once canny and intimate. "It lies on its back as stiff as a stick;/If you flip it over it'll flip back quick," he writes in this mordant nursery rhyme. "If I seem dead when you awake,/Just flip me once, like the hog-nosed snake." Emily Nussbaum is a contributing editor at New York magazine. She writes frequently about poetry.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Even the best things come to an end, and a better end than this little book to Kooser's 21-year practice of sending a Valentine's Day poem to, first, 50 female friends and, eventually, all the women who asked for it (some 2,600 at last count) is hard to imagine. He wrote for fun, he says, as well as affection, and although all my life I have wanted nothing so much / as the love of women, flirtatiousness is as erotic as these poems get. Most etch incidents of loving companionship, patent in the poem about an old man cutting a sandwich in half for his wife and himself, understood in the one about feeling a bond with garbage men extracting good flowers from a florist's trash. Because Kooser is a master of such unpretentious scene-painting, these are poems of rich, Wordsworthian common feeling. They've nearly all appeared in Kooser's previous collections, but especially as accompanied by Robert Hanna's drawings, one per poem, of Kooser's rural Nebraskan homeland, they've never seemed more like godsends or valentines.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1986, Kooser (U.S. poet laureate 2004-2006) started a tradition. He sent a Valentine's Day poem on a postcard to 50 women. Over the past 30 years, he's sent his annual poem to an increasing number of women (in 2007 there were 2,600 recipients). This collection presents all the postcard poems plus one more, dedicated to Kooser's wife, Kathleen. Accompanied by drawings by Robert Hanna, each poem is a unique snapshot of love. The poet says it best himself: "all my life, I have wanted nothing so much as the love of women." (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
