Review by Booklist Review
In this quiet picture-book tribute to the Midwestern poet and children's book author, Ketner incorporates phrases and images from Kooser's works while looking to sources of inspiration in the poet's youth, like seeing himself in a birthday copy of Robert McCloskey's Lentil or letting family stories and Iowa farmers' yarns heard at his grandpa's service station "bloom inside him, / like iris in spring." Later, from a refrigerator box he makes into a writing space, Kooser "paint[s] with words, / portraits of the places / and people he loved" and goes on to serve two terms as poet laureate consultant for the Library of Congress. In Wallace's watercolor illustrations, as spare as the text, the poet poses against white backgrounds as an observant lad next to playfully oversize pencils and as an adult with flying sheets of words. Following an author's note and a list of references, four selected poems offer tastes of Kooser's lyrical sensibility: "Outside, / in silence, with diamonds in his fur, / the winter night curls round the legs of the trees, / sleepily blinking snowflakes from his lashes."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Horn Book Review
From the collaged endpapers illustrated with watercolor vignettes and short childlike verse to reproductions of several of the poems for which Kooser became well known, this spare, quiet picture-book biography honors the former United States poet laureate. Born in Iowa in 1939, young Ted was a shy, unathletic boy, but he was a sponge when it came to the stories the adults in his small town spun. He devoured books and was particularly inspired by McCloskey's Lentil, the classic tale of another boy who finds his own way in a small town. He began "fill[ing] the empty spaces in his soul" by writing poetry and spent the rest of his life soaking in the landscape and people surrounding him and sharing it all in his imagery-filled poems. Ketner's text and Wallace's paintings mingle effectively to provide the proper mood to share Kooser's remarkable story. The book closes with an author's note, a list of Kooser's books and poems referenced, and three of his poems. Christina DorrJanuary/February 2024 p.116 (c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
