Raft

by Ted Kooser

Delightfully universal, Raft by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ted Kooser travels the Midwest landscape, attuned to life’s shared experiences and emotions—illness, aging, beauty, and love.

Raft is our fourth collection of poetry from Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser. Open in his desire to write for the everyday reader, these poems maintain the open-handed and accessible style that thousands have come to love. Yet, deeply imagistic and metaphorically rich, Raft shows us that even the simplest of objects, the simplest of actions, can become a portal. A boy feeding a goldfish becomes a meditation on loneliness. Scraps of gauze open the door to a study on happiness. Both local and delightfully universal, Raft travels the Midwest landscape, attuned to the shared experiences and emotions of life—illness and aging, beauty and love. Some poems, nostalgia-wrapped, cradle elegies for lost family and friends. Adrift on life rafts of language, this book is a lesson in intentional observation, a celebration of the small, quiet wonders of life.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Hardcover

Published September 17, 2024

About the author

Ted Kooser lives in rural Nebraska with his wife, Kathleen, and three dogs. He is one of America's most noted poets, having served two terms as U. S. Poet Laureate and, during the second term, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection, Delights & Shadows. He is a retired life insurance executive who now teaches part-time at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. The school board in Lincoln, Nebraska, recently opened Ted Kooser Elementary School, which Ted says is his greatest honor, among many awards and distinctions. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three nonfiction books. Two of the latter are books on writing, The Poetry Home Repair Manual and Writing Brave and Free, and a memoir, Lights on a Ground of Darkness (all from University of Nebraska Press. Bag in the Wind from Candlewick is his first children's book, with which he is delighted. "It's wonderful," Ted said, "to be writing for young people. I am reinventing myself at age 70."

Reviews

[Jesse Level · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly 20 years ago I met Ted Kooser at a poetry reading he did with Dan Gerber in Port Townsend, Washington, where Copper Canyon Press is located and where I lived at the time. I was an incredibly shy teenager and had to repeat my name three times. Mr. Kooser finally signed my copy of Delights & Shadows “to Jess.” Close enough. Anyway, Kooser was a big influence on me as a young poet. Reading this new collection feels like visiting with an old friend, although perhaps not as effortless as it felt in the past, aka the poetry feels a little more belabored.

[Cameron Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Kooser.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve had the great pleasure to meet Kooser, take a writing workshop from him, and read every new book he puts onto the market. I’m pretty sure these events began while he was the U.S. Poet Laureate, so about 20 years ago. Even those at the top rung of the poetry ladder don’t remain as consistant as Kooser. As The New York Times said years ago, he “has a genius for making the ordinary sacred.”

Now Kooser is retired and spending much of his time in country and small town life. Most of these poems stay on his Everyman/Everyday Path, which is precisely why most of us can identify (even though I’ve never operated any farm equipment). Yet, even as Kooser speaks for us all, he’s not going to bore us. There are always those moments of surprise.

In “The Appointment,” he tells us,

“I give you a man in a waiting room,
waiting, a man so plain, so very ordinary –
…that were he not alone he’d be invisible.”

The first stanza alone could be a stand alone poem except that he closes stanza three, when he

“…takes another chair
farther away from the door…
…Sits down and sits back,
both hands squeezing the arm pads
as the chair slowly starts, idles a moment,
then accelerates into whatever’s to come.”

That was a breathtaking, read again and again moment for me.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahh, Kooser back in his saddle again; what a joy to read; after his Cotton Candy: Poems Dipped Out of the Air I thought the spark was gone; I was wrong; just one to convince you to pick up his works;

AT AN INTERSECTION
On one corner-piece of the billion-piece puzzle—America—is a helmeted girl on a bicycle, stopped for car traffic to pass— green backpack, light jacket, steel clips bunching the cuffs of her jeans, all this canted perhaps ten degrees to the left, her weight on the leg on that side, locked and down, assuming the kickstand position, the other knee cocked, that shoe in a loop on the pedal. One piece from which to begin fitting together the rest, working out and away from this corner, on into the cars, trucks and buses, church spires, water tower, fluttery trees, and beyond, the vast distances, farms, misty forests, dark foothills and pale violet mountains, and above all of this the difficult sky in its millions of pieces all the same blue, although crisscrossed with contrails and floating a few clouds—working out and away from this one little piece upon which she squeezes the brake levers, then relaxes, then squeezes again, looking both directions from under her helmet before kicking off into the morning.

[Therese L. Broderick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The day-to-day experiences and interpersonal encounters of an aging, introspective man are portrayed in "Raft" with consummate acuity: unsurpassable alertness to detail, supreme precision of description (Mr. Kooser is a master of the adjective), deft delineation of human character, and seemingly effortless emergence of metaphor. The prevailing tone of these summing-up poems is rueful; nevertheless, in the voice of so distinguished an American writer as Mr. Kooser, the rueful is made to sound achingly beautiful.

[Robert Ham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like this poet, and found his latest to be, as usual, accessible, alive with little details most people would miss, clear-eyed, unpretentious, and honest. Some of them resonated with me much more than others, which I think will be the case with most readers. I have a habit of searching for (and sometimes waiting for) Selected Poems, but I'm pushing 70 and this is beginning to seem counterproductive, though I would hightly recommend Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems. He also edits a series, Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry, with many fine entries in it--my favorite of these is Jared Carter Darkened Rooms of Summer. Amazon has them, and you can ususally find them used. There are a couple places in Raft where he speaks about his health, and he mentions cancer. I really hope he's doing OK.

[Andy Kristensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a great collection of conversational-style poetry. The prose is simple and easy to understand, but don’t let that fool you—Kooser writes about many heavy/dark themes deftly (death, aging, melancholia, nostalgia, dreams), his imagery is beautiful, and his attention to detail is bar none, catching things that many other writers would miss in their everyday descriptions of the world.

[Erin Buursma · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good! Had to read this book for class but I really really loved it. There were so many poems that I finished and then had to just sit for a minute digesting. Some of these poems put words to experiences I didn’t know I needed described. The poems evoke all sorts of emotions but overall they made me set the book down feeling happier than when I picked it up :)

[Linda Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book of poetry during a difficult period of my life reading a poem or two each morning. Kooser’s poems connect with me. The images are familiar. I hear his voice as I read. Thank you Mr. Kooser for becoming a part of my life.

[Bruce Cline · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite poet, at least one among several. I especially like two things about Mr Kooser’s poetry: 1) for the most part he writes about real things, or at least subjects that seem real to me, and 2) a fair portion of his poems help me to see into parts of my own life.

[David Ferguson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ted Kooser is a great modern poet.

[Dave Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ted Kooser is probably my favorite poet. All the usual words apply - accessible, straight-forward, detailed. His poems paint a very clear picture of place.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry

[Nancy Gumb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good poems about everyday people and places!

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like sitting down and just listening to someone tell you their memories, one after another. You just listen.