With his wonderful metaphors and his trademark compassion, Ted Kooser is a poet with many gifts. The gift that I appreciate most is his ability to look at ordinary things — rain, clouds, trees — and see what no one else sees. “Spatters of raindrops cold as dimes, and a torn gray curtain of cloud floats out of a broken window of sky,” (57) he writes. I marvel at his ability to notice when “the trees, like tuning forks, begin to hum.” For him, ordinary things are “rich with interest,” and this awareness makes his poems shimmer and glow.
Ted Kooser, Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 2014), p. 60.