Flying At Night: Poems 1965-1985

by Ted Kooser

Book Overview

Named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006, Ted Kooser is one of America's masters of the short metaphorical poem. Dana Gioia has remarked that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation. In Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, Kooser has selected poems from two of his earlier works, Sure Signs and One World at a Time (1985). Taken together or read one at a time, these poems clearly show why William Cole, writing in the Saturday...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822958775
• ISBN13: 9780822958772
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Simple Metaphors

Wonderful! Kooser connects with people through "real life" experiences that are relative to real life. From the abandoned farm littered with past possessions and the stories they tell to watching parents grow older and begin to whither, to everyday happenings, letters, and conversations, Mr. Kooser is able to tell each story with a simple metaphor its own. "Flying at Night" would be a great introduction to poetry, but it is also a collection to be enjoyed and remembered by those who indulge in poetry regularly.

Good stuff.

Ted Kooser, Flying at Night (University of Pittsburgh, 2005) For the first quarter of this book, it seemed to me something was missing. I'm still not entirely sure what it was, but then things smoothed out a bit, presumably as Kooser got older (I'm assuming rough chronological order here). From that point on, it's the same sort of stuff Ted Kooser has written for the past thirty-odd years, and it's all quite good: "Behind each garage a ladder sleeps in the leaves, its hands folded across its lean belly. There are hundreds of them in each town, and more sleeping by the haystacks and barns out in the country-- tough old day laborers, seasoned and wheezy, drunk on the weather, sleeping outside with the crickets." ("Late September") Kooser has a sense of the simple in language matched by very few living American poets-- Simic, Sadoff, Allbery, a few others. He's pretty much the embodiment of Williams' "no ideas but in things" charge here. An excellent book (for most of its length), and highly recommended. ****

You'll go back to it from time to time...or at least you should.

As I have read poetry in the last six years I have gotten in the habit (not always the best) of either marking the corner of or 'dog-earing' a page with a poem that I like. I've found that I've marked alot of corners in Mr. Kooser's book. I have especially liked his poems that contemplate the somber side of life. I've gone back to "After My Grandmother's Funeral" multiple times to wrestle again, as Kooser does, with the tension between youth and aging...and the realities of death. You'll find yourself doing the same when you read these poems.

Plain language, striking metaphors

My daughter's high school has an acronym for certain literature assignments: DHM, deep hidden meaning. If you are weary of DHM, then read Mr. Kooser. DM, no H. He uses Saxon-rooted vocabulary for metaphors so apt, yet stunning, that they stop you short. I will give this book as presents to my best friends.

Delightful

Ted Kooser is the poet for the rest of us. Mr. Kooser shuns intellectual poetry, the kind that makes you feel you need an interpreter to understand it. His poems are down-to-earth, rooted in an intense love for the simple pleasures of life. He lives on a farm in Nebraska and his work resonates with images from this rural lifestyle. This was the first book of poetry I willfully sought out and bought since college; reading it has been pure delight.