Delights & Shadows
by Ted Kooser
Summary
Delights & Shadows pays close attention to small Midwestern scenes: aging bodies, the weather, a father's memory, the ordinary furniture of rural and small town life rendered so precisely that the objects themselves seem to give off light. Kooser's style is famously clear and economical, built on fresh, surprising similes that turn a plain object into something worth stopping for, and the collection embodies his stated belief that poetry should welcome the general reader without giving up any precision to do it.
Individual poems carry real particularity. "At the Cancer Clinic" watches a daughter guide her mother slowly across a waiting room, finding tenderness in exactly the kind of unremarkable moment most poems skip past. "Tattoo" reads an old man's faded ink as a record of a life the poem never states outright, letting the image do the work a longer explanation would only weaken. "Skater" and "Father" work the same way, taking a single scene and holding it still long enough for its full weight to arrive.
Reading Delights & Shadows means encountering poems short enough to read in a minute and plain enough that nothing stands between the reader and the image, though the plainness is the product of real craft rather than simplicity for its own sake. It suits a reader who wants poetry that speaks in the register of ordinary conversation, precise about weather and family and the body, without asking for special literary training to follow it. The same restraint that keeps each poem short also keeps it from ever slipping into easy sentiment, since Kooser trusts a single accurate image to do more work than an explicit statement of feeling could.
Historical Context & Significance
Delights & Shadows won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's finalists were William Matthews's posthumous Search Party: Collected Poems and Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard. Kooser won while serving as United States Poet Laureate, a position he held from 2004 to 2006, so the Pulitzer arrived in the middle of his laureateship and confirmed the standing the book had built the previous year.
Kooser worked in insurance for thirty five years, rising to vice president before retiring at sixty, writing his poems each morning before work rather than making a full time career of literature. Critic Dana Gioia described his approach as built on common speech and subject matter common to the Midwest, and Kooser has resisted being labeled a merely regional poet even as his laureateship helped popularize exactly the plain, accessible style Delights & Shadows demonstrates at its best.