How to find the best ted kooser for 2019?

Ted Kooser, who served as United States Poet Laureate (20042006), is a poet who works toward clarity and accessibility, so that each distinctive poem appears to be as fresh and bright and spontaneous as a good watercolor painting. He is a haiku-like imagist who imbues his poems with "tender wisdom, and draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life.

Praise for Delights and Shadows:

"Ted Kooser...has a genius for making the ordinary sacred."The New York Times

"A sense of wonder and compassion runs through this Pulitzer Prize winning volume Kooser's poetry is understated yet manages to skillfully illuminate the small moments of life."Christian Science Monitor

"[Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes that way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can't help but feel significant truths behind his lines."The Philadelphia Inquirer

"There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, Delights & Shadows. Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms."Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post

"Delights and Shadows is a book with a deep stillness at its center, perfectly self-contained."Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times

"Kooser's ninth collection of poems reflects the simple and remarkable things of everyday life. That he often sees things we do not would be delight enough, but more amazing is exactly what he sees. Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated.Highly recommended."Library Journal

"Few poets depict the Midwest so accurately or with such tender regard... Kooser excels at the brief, imagistic poem."The Kansas City Star

"Delights and Shadows raises the voice of the poet above everything else. Each short, vivid poem on the page reads as if it were being spoken aloud. Details about cemeteries, dictionaries, a doctor's waiting room, and a jar of buttons bristle with sound and awareness. Kooser's ability to use brief lyrics to compose a music of discovery and regeneration makes his work radiant and consuming... This is not an extended, complex or experimental kind of writing, but poetry that rings true, allowing the human sound of being to exist on the page."Bloomsbury Review

"Here is the gift and fragility of life."The Wichita Eagle

"Kooser is a master of the subjective description. Empathetic without sentimentality, his eye ranges over all sorts of everyday subjects and finds material everywhere wherever the unpredictable particularity of the world can be glimpsed Perhaps Koosers success lies in his determination to see the things of this world with such clarity and passion that their underlying mysteries, delights, and shadows also become clear, if only for a moment."The Georgia Review

"You can almost see Kooser behind the poems, watching the world like a sketch artist Kooser displays the same kind of fluid strokes Degas used in his ballet pictures...He is an exquisite miniaturist of daily life."The Hartford Courant

"The poet finds magic in activities and objects typically considered mundane... Metaphors are the treasure of these short, imagistic poems, emphasizing the wonder and delight latent in what is often merely taken for granted."Harvard Review

"Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation." Dana Gioia

"Kooser is straightforward, possesses an American essence, is humble, gritty, ironic and has a gift for detail and a deceptive simplicity."Seattle Post-Intelligencer

As Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser launched the weekly poetry column "American Life in Poetry," which appears in over 100 newspapers nationwide. He is the author of ten books of poems, including the collaboration with Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (isbn 9781556591877).

"Ted Kooser must be the most accessible and enjoyable major poet in America. His lines are so clear and simple." Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"Readers [of Splitting an Order] will find 'characters' both strange and wonderful, animal or human. There is a sense that time is passing quickly and that everything worthy must be captured and savored." Library Journal, starred review

"Kooser's ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift." Bloomsbury Review

Hailed by Library Journal as "a master of the single-metaphor poem," Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling poet Ted Kooser calls attention to the intimacies of life through commonplace objects and occurrences. This collectionten years in the makingis rich with quiet and profound magnificence.

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half
. . . and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

Ted Kooser is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon), which won the Pulitzer Prize. A former US Poet Laureate, Kooser serves as editor for "American Life in Poetry," a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper column.

Ted Kooser sees a writers workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, whats jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life.

Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year.

Written by one of Americas most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him.

In the end, what makes life meaningful for Kooser are the ways in which his neighbors care for one another and how an afternoon walking with an old dog, or baking a pie, or decorating the house for Christmas can summon memories of his Iowa childhood. This writer is a seer in the truest sense of the word, discovering the extraordinary within the ordinary, the deep beneath the shallow, the abiding wisdom in the pithy Bohemian proverbs that are woven into his essays.

The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser is a comprehensive examination of the former US Poet Laureates long-time contribution to American letters.For many years, Koosers work, while well-regarded among regional audiences in the Midwest and Great Plains, had been considered quaint and provincial by readers elsewhere. This attitude largely changed circa 1980 with the publication of Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems, when Koosers work began to receive national readership.

In this new critical study, Mark Sanders, a long-time critic, publisher, and supporter of Great Plains poetry, compiles a comprehensive overview and evaluation of Koosers poetic legacy.The Weight of the Weather gathers numerous criticisms, book reviews, reflections, and interviews that span Koosers long poetic career, including work by a number of critics and fellow poetsDana Gioia, David Baker, and Jonathan Holden among them. The book endeavors to balance early appraisals of Koosers work, from 1980 and before, through his contemporary success and popularity.

Kooser, a Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, served as US Poet Laureate from 20042006; among his many collections of poetry is Delights & Shadows which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Long-noted for his poetrys accessibility, clarity, and precision, Koosers poetry has too often been compartmentalized as regional or pastoral; The Weight of the Weather changes that perspective.Indeed, Koosers work is universally American, deeply ingrained in the poetic traditions of Whitman, Frost, Williams, Stafford, and Stevens.