Raft
by Ted Kooser
(Copper Canyon, 2024, 94 pp., $23.00)
Ted Kooser has that rare ability to maintain, from poem to poem, a voice that is immediately recognizable for its devotion to the truth of simple observation. Throughout his career, he has been steadfast in his commitment to discovery, against backdrops ranging from the quotidian to the otherworldly. In his most recent book, Raft, Kooser’s unabashed use of figurative language strikes readers of contemporary poetry with a familiarity that still fascinates, inviting us to return to the genuine allure of poetry.
Raft evinces Kooser’s uncompromising use of metaphor, as seen, for instance, in the poem “Moon Shadows”: “All night the moon was a lamp held steady….” And he has no reservations about personifying an oak tree “compos[ing] a long letter, thoughtfully forming / each word in the copperplate script / of its shadows.” After wondering who that letter might be addressed to, the speaker awakens to find that the shadows have disappeared and the “sky was gray.” Yet, the tree is still standing, “reaching up into a few scattered snowflakes” if only to “let them slip through, / and there was no letter, whatever its message.” Although the tree has no “letter,” its “message” is clear—it is the tree itself. Such a turn as this is characteristic of Kooser’s work. As he explains in a 2010 interview in the Writer’s Chronicle, “To show my readers something remarkable about an ordinary, ubiquitous thing is part of my calling as a writer.”
Indeed, Raft is replete with poems about the ordinary, whether people or things: the choreography of a boy feeding goldfish, a hotel maid overwhelmed by linens, an older man taking a walk with a younger man. There are also chance encounters, often between strangers, or people reunited after many years, those who were once familiar but who now are strangers. Whether writing about nature or childhood, Kooser captures liminal moments in a manner suggestive of Wordsworth’s “spots of time”—and he sees, as Wordsworth did, the grandeur of the commonplace, where nothing is too mundane to enchant the imagination.
Raft is comprised of three sections in total. In the titular “Raft” of Section One, the speaker and his boyhood friends discover a barn door “at the said to be bottomless pond / at the sandpit,” which some older boys have left behind as a raft, and, seemingly, as a rite of passage. Young and spontaneous, the four boys find themselves “frightened but laughing” while situated atop the precarious door. Trying to balance upon it, they have “not a forethought among us for a pole / to push out with, nor a plank for an oar, / as we trusted that door as it floated / not on but under the surface….” Trust is key here, trust in each other, trust in the raft to hold them up despite its being submerged:
Seventy years later, I still feel that door
sinking under my weight, can still see
the white faces of Larry and Billy
and Danny looking across into mine
as we held our arms wide, as if to keep
some wild, free, invisible creature
there at the center from running away,
and at eighty, I know what that was.
The poem is ambiguous about what, exactly, it is “there at the center,” whether it is balance, or something more ominous. While the reader may assume that this “creature” is what is keeping the boys afloat, this “creature” is also something that is “wild” and “free,” infused, perhaps, with the spontaneity and adventure of childhood. In my view, the “creature” is neither safety nor danger but rather the spirit of the imagination, awakened in childhood, and sustained over the course of one’s life. The speaker did not realize it then, but he recognizes it now, seventy years later. This is not simply a poem nostalgic about adolescence, it is a poem about keeping alive that adventurous spirit within, not to mention the Wordsworthian restoration of memory later in life.
Another poem, “Room Service,” meditates on a hotel maid changing bedsheets:
Through the open door of the room across from mine
I saw a woman unmaking a bed. She looked bone weary
as she hauled in the bleached, empty net of a sheet,
heaping it, rank from the depths, at her feet…
The poem transforms the used bedsheet into a fishing net, and the clean sheets into ocean waves. The guests (who slept on the sheets the night before) have now slipped through “that seine and swum on, and no one / had been there to see those naked creatures, fish-belly white, / / as they rose through layers of dream / to lip at the dark, / to effortlessly fin in and out of the netting / / and then to be gone….” The sheets, as billowing waves, are conflated with hotel guests continuously coming in and going out. For Kooser, repetition in labor is like repetition in the poet’s task; both are disarming, and both are transformative.
“Shepherd of Carts” addresses a man working in a Walmart’s busy parking lot, collecting the empty carts as if they were lost sheep: “A few years ago I wrote a short poem / describing you in your yellow safety vest, / in the rain, pushing a jingling train of carts across / the Walmart parking lot, / and then left you behind….” There is a tinge of regret in these lines, as well as a clever sense of the symbolic. The poet, veering off, seems to abandon the poem, just as the careless shoppers have abandoned their carts without returning them, making the work of shepherding all the more difficult. Spotting the workman’s dayglow vest, the speaker ensures that he has not gone unnoticed. Ethically, for Kooser, recognizing those who ordinarily go unseen is crucial, not only as a poet, but as an empathetic person, the two being synonymous:
I saw you again, collecting your dingy,
belled flock gone astray, not much changed
about you, you with the same dark look
beneath the bill of your cap, and those same
ratty sneakers splayed out in a sort of
duck-walk from all the pushing…
This is vintage Kooser, who, by way of the poetic imagination, goes on to inhabit the subjectivity of the other. It is a Sisyphean task, catching a cart only to have it wander away again, until the last detail is rendered, and the humanity of the shepherd is made visible, if not in life, then at least in poetry:
me trying to fit into your broken-down,
badly run-over shoes, feeling a cart handle
cold in my fingers, the last drops of rain
starry bright on backs of my hands.
Section One closes with one of Kooser’s most exquisite, most understated poems. In “Gauze,” the speaker asks in a manner remarkably devoid of self-pity: “Can a man in his eighties, with cancer, / be happy?” He answers, “[it] seems that he can,” and then he describes scattering “yesterday’s gauze dressing” over the grass for the wrens, who are building their nests after a long winter. Watching the wrens make something of value out of the surgical gauze gives the speaker a cyclical sense of life and death, as well as of happiness, and it brings to mind his building a birdhouse as a boy:
In his birdhouses built with the old boards
that he salvaged in happiness, which he
hammered together in happiness, too.
Building the house gives the child a sense of accomplishment; of course, the image is likewise suggestive of Kooser the poet, who here seems to be reflecting upon the many poems he has built for readers.
Section Two of Raft shifts to poems about the natural world, seen up close, as in the poem “Glint.” “Glint” opens characteristically with a casual observation: “I watched a glint of morning sunlight / climbing a thread of spider’s silk / in a gentle breeze.” The speaker watches it shimmy up from the grass to the branch and leaves, followed by “glint after glint.” From there he sees it synesthetically, in terms of sound: “one clear, shining note / … as if the sun / were tuning the day, then handing it / to me to play.” As exemplified in “Glint,” the visual sense is always primary in Kooser’s poetry.
Poems like “A Place in the Air,” “Fawns,” and “Nocturne” embody the spirit of the lyric, but they also narrate stories, often inspired by the mere presence of ordinary objects. In “Worn Smooth,” for instance, the speaker describes a ladder while imagining a man climbing up and down it:
Not the full width of the rungs
on that ancient oak ladder, but
the centers, where his hands fit
and his sandy boots followed,
up into the loft with its low hills
of dusty, dead hay, the tin roof
a starscape of holes sprinkling
light on a stack of used lumber…
The speaker recalls how the man climbed up and down it, “carrying this or that, burden / or blessing, on a ladder that might / have been too heavy to move but / weighed almost nothing in place.” When it is supporting his weight, and when it is being moved, the ladder is heavy, but at rest it is weightless, reminiscent of poetry itself, both earthbound and light. As with the ladder, even in a whiskbroom something catches the speaker’s eye, the unseen, the unnoticed. Here the broom has swept up “this miniscule blossom, used up but clinging / to what it was meant for, still with some dusty sky in it.” While the fields have been mowed away, a dried flower, that has lost its seeds, comes to “sweeten a broom.”
It is only in the third and final section that Kooser’s cancer diagnosis enters the foreground. Section Three focuses on memory, occasional poems, poems about people lost and found again, and more profoundly, poems about old age, wisdom, regret, and mortality. The volume ends with “Bird,” a poem that makes a statement that is somewhat unusual for Kooser, as it seems to extend the conversation rather than bringing it to a close. This poem, both personal and ambiguous, analogizes death, and the overall arc of the book’s various encounters.
“Bird” recounts a chance encounter in a cemetery between the speaker’s mother and the mother’s schoolmate. Each one is there to lay flowers and decorative items upon the gravesite of a loved one. Each one, after all the decades that have passed since their last meeting, recognizes a feature in the other that renders her suddenly identifiable. What each one sees in the other is their lost childhood, which theme conjures the volume’s opening poem, “Raft”:
“they reached out and took each other’s elbows, and they looked into each other’s eyes, and the woman, whose voice faltered an instant, softly said “Vera,” and my mother, whose voice caught, too, said “Bird.”
One might wonder why Kooser would choose to end Raft with this moment of silent communion. Kooser’s poems typically end in epiphany; however, here the sense of sudden realization is forestalled, at least for us readers, who are not familiar with the person bearing the name “Bird.” Rather than share in this flashbulb moment, we are left to simply ponder the meaning of “Bird,” not as a name but as a word. For readers, then, as for the classmates meeting in the cemetery after all these years, the significance of the chance encounter is a blend of the old and the new—the intimately recognizable and the strangely unfamiliar.
Birds have that unique ability to inhabit both the earth and the sky, and so the image of the woman named “Bird” leaves us with an elusive feeling, one that is as indistinct and fleeting as the sight of an old friend after many decades is precise. The feeling we are left with is but a faint suggestion. It leaves behind only a trace in the mind—I believe this is Kooser’s signature. For he lives out there on the edge of flight, always, before too long, touching down on earth again.