Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison

by Ted Kooser

A collection of poetry by Ted Kooser.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887483364
• ISBN13: 9780887483363
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A master poet, intimate moments

Kooser is a master, but this collection of his postcard poems to a friend during cancer recovery is very powerful. An intimite glimpse at despair and hope all mixed up with the wonder of winter mornings. Easy to see why he's been the US Poet Laureate.

Delicious tidbits of observation

Ted Kooser manages to eloquently describe the world around him without ever being puffed up, aluding to obscure classics or requiring PhD research. This volume is just a wonderful, accessable group of poetic morsels that go down smoothly and leave you hungering for more.

To Know That We Are Not Alone

This book, by our current Poet Laureate, is as fine a book of modern poetry as you can hope for. During his treatment for cancer, the author is given medication that makes his skin sun-sensitive. So, in order to maintain his daily habit of walking the country roads of Nebraska for exercise, he has to do it before the sun comes up. To allay the inherent loneliness, he decides to send a friend, Jim Harrison, a poem on a postcard everyday. So, in the company of one of his dogs, plenty of different birds, and a keenly inquisitive mind to which nothing is ordinary and everything informs on everything else, this book was born. I usually read such a book in less than a week, marking the more effective poems in the table for contents for when I return. I couldn't shake this one for three weeks, and I read and read each of them poems three and four times before moving on to the next. It's winter in New England; that may be part of it. And the grey dawn hand of mortality has overshadowed me for the last few months as well. But neither is real reason I kept this faithful book with me; fundamentally, it's just a good book. Look past that startlingly honest title and start reading. You won't regret it. C. S. Lewis quoted a student, who quoted his father, saying, "We read to know that we are not alone." If every a book does that, this does.

Observations

Ted Kooser is a meticulous observer of life. If you read his work thoughtfully, you can learn how to appreciate the world you live in.

Making something special with it

Fabric: the opening, dedicatory poem sketches a man's early morning walk along a road, a road that reminds him of an unrolled length of cloth, and the dark fields in the distance seem like the counter in the store his father worked at. He remembers his father behind the counter unrolling a bolt of cloth for the boy and saying "you can make something special with this." Kooser, fighting cancer when he wrote these postcards, continues to use his naturally metaphorical imagination to transform common things and daily events into well-timed and expertly sculpted poems. There are at least a dozen gems in this collection and memorable metaphors and similes on nearly every page. The postcards--poems no longer than a page, and mostly much shorter than that--form a diary of sorts, not only a response to and a subtle record of his battle with cancer, but a testimony to his joy in the heartbreaking beauty of existence. Kooser uses items from what Randall Jarrell called "the dailiness of life" to slide back to the past and to clarify the present. The "material"--his father, his mother, his uncle, roadside refuse, the moon, birds, graveyards, robes, a snowflake, the creaking snow, bolts of cloth--is embroidered beautifully and succinctly. This book will lodge in the memory and engender respect for the overlooked yet rich fabric of our daily lives.