POETS’ CORNER

Delights & Shadows

Ted Kooser

Copper Canyon Press: 96 pp., $15

“Delights & Shadows” is a book with a deep stillness at its center, perfectly self-contained, yet echoing like a country well. Kooser, recently chosen as our new poet laureate, has been writing poems for 30 years. He lives in Nebraska and is a recently retired life insurance executive.

The modesty of the background from which he draws inspiration heightens the poems’ ingratiating manner. This is a poet writing in the tradition of Thomas McGrath, without the all-defining politics -- though these are poems of the Great Plains -- and prairie poems carry with them (as any poet born in this part of America knows) a natural populist gravity and humor. In a poem called “Depression Glass,” he recalls sipping “the bitter percolation” from “cups / it had taken a year to collect / at the grocery, with one piece free / for each five pounds of flour.”

By contrast, some poems are too lightly rendered, a bit facile and sentimental. Others share a buoyancy that lifts them, on one hand, into the realm of the Stevie Smith-like whimsical:

his hands fluttered like

birds,

each with a fancy silk

ribbon

to weave into their nest,

as he stood at the mirror

dressing for work, waving

hello

to himself with both hands.

One poem, “Walking on Tiptoe,” is like a Darwinian treatise rendered in poem-argument:

There is a little spring to our walk,

We are so burdened with responsibility,

all of the disciplinary actions

that have fallen to us, the punishments,

the killings, and all with our feet

bound stiff in the skins of the conquered.

Still others offer an authorial vision of the process of memory, touching down like a tornado:

... it sucked up into its heart

hot work, cold work, lunch

baskets

good horses, bad horses,

... .then rattled the dented

tin sides

of the threshing machines.

... with a sound like a sigh,

drew up

its crowded, roaring, dusty

funnel,

and there at its tip was the

nib of a pen.

*

The Descent

Sophie Cabot Black

Graywolf Press: 72 pp., $14

Sophie CABOT BLACK, in her second book, “The Descent,” is absolutely direct and absolutely removed -- a strange confluence of tones that is both intellectually provocative and deeply moving. So much of contemporary poetry is either falsely analytical or mired in subjective feeling; these poems, fueled by both passion and restraint, are powerhouses of thought and expressiveness.

They are also mysterious, apart from yet tied to the cultivated earth, to animal life and to the impossibility of truly knowing another soul. A poem like “The Tooth,” for example, is astonishing -- unsparing in its refusal of sentimentality yet mourning spectacularly the brutal death of a coyote that has been a farm predator -- and extends grief into metaphysical clarity and dread:

... The coyote lies at the

edge

Of the lake. I meant this, I

did not;

the death I paid for

Has come: a bad job of it, her

jaw blown off, her

underside

Gone, legs strung up with

bailing wire, the body

dragged

And quickly buried under

leaves. When you pray, when you

Try to pray, words do not

correspond in this

crowded light

The poem goes on to consider not just the creation and destruction of life but the artifact, the fetish, the desperate symbol of essence: what is left of the coyote, the pure white tooth -- “more clean and white than even God could be.” The tooth rises out of a “midst where the living cling / where there is no trace.”

That “midst,” that in medias res, where the living cling to ongoingness, is the place where these revelatory poems center themselves. Black’s voice is startling, jagged and implacable, and “The Descent” is steep, precipitous and dazzling -- all the way down from a hard-earned heaven.