Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry – serie

For nearly half a century Jared Carter has been quietly mapping the American heartland. Line by line, his poetry has shown us the landscape, sounded the voices, conjured the music, and tested the silence of the ever-changing and yet ever-constant Midwest that figures so prominently in the American story. And yet what we find in Carter’s poetry is endlessly new. Here, in poems selected from his first five books, is the summer-long buzz of the cicada and the crack of the cue ball, the young rebel on his big Harley, and the YMCA secretary who backstrokes her way across the indoor pool. Here, too, are thirty new poems in fixed form that illustrate Carter’s continued quest for a poetry of “universal interest.” Taken together, these selections are, truly, poetry in the American grain.

For decades a restorer of old homes, Connie Wanek shows us that poetry is everywhere, encountered as easily in the waterways, landscapes, and winters of Minnesota, as in the old roofs and darkened drawers of a home long uninhabited. Rival Gardens includes more than thirty unpublished poems, along with poems selected from three previous books-all in Wanek’s unmistakable voice: plainspoken and elegant, unassuming and wise, observant and original. Many of her new poems focus on the garden, beginning with the Garden of Eden. A deep feeling for family and for the losses and gains of growing into maturity mark the tone of Rival Gardens, with Wanek always attending to the telling detail and the natural world.

The Woods Are On Fire is Fleda Brown’s deeply human and intensely felt poetic explorations of her life and world. Her account includes her brain-damaged brother, a rickety family cottage, a puzzling and sometimes frightening father, a timid mother, and the adult life that follows with its loves, divorces, and serious illnesses. Visually and emotionally rich, Brown’s poems call on Einstein, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Law and Order, Elvis, and Beethoven. They stand before the Venus de Milo as well as the moon, as they measure distances between what we make as art and who we are as humans. In wide-ranging forms-from the sestina to prose poems-they focus on the natural world as well as the Delaware legislature and the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton.The Woods Are On Fire includes nearly fifty new poems, along with poems selected from seven previous books, showcasing an influential American poet’s work over the last few decades.

Gerald Costanzo, long known as one of the best contemporary poets of satire, focuses specifically on American themes that, though presented as parables, fables, jokes, and put-ons, remain darkly serious in tone. His subject is the mythic landscape of America itself: the transitory, popular, consumer culture of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life.Costanzo evokes a sense of having arrived on the scene too late, of having missed the heyday of American innocence and possibility, and now-in the present-is forced to live with diminished experience. He mourns a culture where genuine emotion cannot be found but where its semblance can be endlessly marketed. Regular Haunts is a retrospective collection of Costanzo’s work that also includes nearly thirty new poems.

Joyce Sutphen’s evocations of life on a small farm, coming of age in the late 1960s, and traveling and searching for balance in a very modern world are both deeply personal and familiar. Readers from Maine to Minnesota and beyond will recognize themselves, their parents, aunts and uncles, and neighbors in these poems, which move us from delight in keen description toward something like wisdom or solace in the things of this world.In addition to poems selected from the last twenty-five years, Carrying Water to the Field includes more than forty new poems on the themes of luck, hard work, and the ravages of time-erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language and lyrical precision.

2022 High Plains Book Award Winner in PoetryMarjorie Saiser’s strong, clear language makes the reader feel at home in her poems. Dealing with all the ways love goes right and wrong, this collection honors the challenges of holding firm to who we really are, as well as our connections to the natural world.The Track the Whales Make includes poems from Saiser’s seven previous books, along with new ones. Her poetry originates from the everyday things we might overlook in the hurry of our daily routines, giving us a chance to stop and appreciate the little things, while wrapped in her comforting diction. Because the poems come from ordinary life, there is humor alongside happiness and sadness, the mixed bag we survive or create, day by day.

The poems in Produce Wagon explore the vast and varied circumstances of the human experience. Roy Scheele delves into his love for his wife in “Remembrances,” the opening poem from his first chapbook, and “Driving after Dark”; his fascination with the natural world in poems such as “How the Fox Got Away” and “Late Autumn Woods”; his appreciation of his family in “A Kitchen Memory” and “The Long Rise”; and his fondness for stories in “The Carny Circuit” and “In the Clear.” In these and the other poems in the collection, Scheele uses a variety of traditional verse forms as well as free verse and syllabics, carefully fitting the form of each poem to his subject matter.Though most of the poems are set in Nebraska and neighboring states, there is a universality to the subjects Scheele addresses. In these poems anywhere is everywhere.