[New-Poetry] Kooser

[Bob Grumman]

David Graham wrote:
> David Mason appreciates the work of Ted Kooser for *The Dark Horse*, a 
> Scottish journal I recently discovered.  The article is in a PDF file, 
> address below.  The main magazine page is here:
>
> http://www.star.ac.uk/darkhorse.html
>
> http://www.star.ac.uk/darkhorse/archive/MasonOnKooser.pdf
>
> Here's a snippet:
>
> " It’s a great poem ["That Was I," fr. *Delights & Shadows*] without 
> making any big gestures at greatness. It has all of Ted’s wisdom in 
> it, his compassion and skepticism and respect for life.  If you open 
> yourself to what this poetry offers, you have to admit that much of 
> what seems so simple is deceptively so. For this reason, Ted is 
> commonly compared to Frost, and while his vision is not quite Frost’s 
> and his technique is less inclined to the sort of formal mastery Frost 
> espoused, he is indeed a writer who repays re-reading even while he 
> speaks to us directly on a first hearing. Critics who bypass Kooser, 
> thinking him insufficiently complex, are missing a rigorous, original 
> American voice."
>
I'm afraid my predictable response to this is, "It isn't how rigorously 
original a poet's voice is but what he does with it that counts, and 
Kooser just putts the average person's life back at him.

--from Guess-Who
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