Karl Shapiro's introduction to Ted Kooser's second collection, A Local Habitation & a Name (1974), contains a still perfect assessment of Kooser's poetry: "honesty and lucidity, the sharpness of focus" and "that mysterious quality of voice." With The Life and Poetry of Ted Kooser, Mary Stillwell--a former student of her subject as well as a fellow Nebraskan--has written a fine, authoritative first biography of the former U.S. Poet Laureate.
Though Iowan by birth, Kooser has spent most of his life in Nebraska, where, for years, he was employed in the same business as Wallace Stevens: insurance. So, at first, poetry was an avocation, not an academic career. He studied architecture at Iowa State but turned to English, teaching high school for a year before going to graduate school in Lincoln, where he worked with Shapiro. His first book, Official Entry Blank, foreshadows lifelong themes such as the language and expanse of the Great Prairie, already casting his idiomatic voice into favorite forms like the lyric and dramatic monologue.
Stillwell beautifully chronicles Kooser's close relationship with fellow Midwest writer Jim Harrison. When Kooser was chosen as poet laureate, she writes, he was "completely flummoxed," and worked hard to get his weekly poetry columns picked up by newspapers. This is a lovely book about a humble man's life. As he says in his memoir, Local Wonders, "This is the life, I have chosen." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher