A MAN WITH A RAKE

Kooser, a former U.S. poet laureate, finds moral drama in rural stillness over the course of his latest poetry chapbook.

In these 18 poems, people watch and are watched; a woman crosses a highway to pick up her mail, a bull guards a field of cows, and the eponymous raker takes a break from work: “he’d been watching the rake / tick around clockwise, minute to minute, / a fine afternoon passing forever away, / but he’s figured out now how to slow it / all down….” Slowing it all down is often just what these poems are after. The works find inspiration in tiny happenings: “I watched a glint of morning sunlight / climbing a thread of spider’s silk / in a gentle breeze” begins “A Glint.” Another, about a farmer at a titular “Farm Sale,” ends, “He’s got / his cap on square, nothing better / to do on a warm Saturday morning / than to park at the far end of / where all of the others have parked, / and to walk up the road, in no hurry / to see what’s for sale at the sale.” In these quiet rhythms of American rural life—the moments between work and whatever comes next—Kooser, a Pulitzer Prize winner, seeks the sublime, and he crafts lyrics out of accessible, everyday language. He finds music in the creaking of old farmhouses, the pump of well water, and the squealing of piglets in a cardboard box. It’s a slim collection, but every poem leaves a mark. The highlight is perhaps “A Mouse Nest,” which reimagines Robert Burns’ famous discovery of a mouse’s hovel. In Kooser’s work, the nest is in the steel housing of a basement band saw. After the speaker dismantles the nest, he returns later to see if the mouse and its young are still present: “every trace of what had happened to us there / was gone, except for a little red fiberboard sawdust.” These poems, too, are like this sawdust—what remains of a happening experienced and then gone.

A quick series of precise poems by an American master.