What could be better than poems written on postcards by Ted Kooser and mailed to Jim Harrison?  Kooser, at 87, is one of the very best American contemporary poets, a former U.S. Poet Laureate and still writing the plain,  beautiful poetry that has resulted in 30 books and a Pulitzer Prize.  Harrison, who died in 2016, was another prolific writer contributing novels, short stories, and poetry along with two wonderfully resplendent and rollicking memoirs.  Their long friendship was the basis for Kooser’s writing these daily postcards during the winter of 1999 as he recovered from cancer surgery and was told to stay out of the sun, a relatively easy task in a Nebraska winter.  The fact that Kooser wrote the poems on postcards sealed the deal for me since anyone who has read BookMarks knows of my love for my daily postcard recording my day of life, as Kooser did, while acknowledging its mundane, quotidian element of what time I arose.

These small poems result from what Lydia Davis identified as the source of much writing and perhaps all poetry—a hyper-acute skill of observation and a compulsion to translate those observations of the world and the self into words as a way of understanding what we’re doing here.  In this case, Kooser’s brief but brilliant captures of the Nebraska countryside in the early hours before dawn in the bitter cold  of winter is proof of these characteristics.

Among the 100 poems, I could quote dozens which I loved either for the shape of the entirety or for a single word or phrase, but here’s one that I particularly enjoyed:

December 12: Sunny, still and cold

Found, on the gravel road I walked this morning/one beer can, part full of frozen tobacco juice/that when I shook it came apart like chunks of amber,/and a quarter-sized piece from a fluted china plate,/with a soft pink rose the size of a pencil eraser/and a curl of flying, pale blue ribbon.  In a nearby tree,/five noisy crows who had seen me stooping there/were busy creating a plausible story.

Enough said.  Brief, self-contained, beautifully framed and phrased, and clearly evoking a moment in time—Kooser is quietly incredible.  I love sitting back and thinking of Kooser bundling up in the pre-dawn dark, walking and looking, returning to the warming house to write the poem on a postcard, licking the stamp, driving to the post office, and Harrison, eating a huge nearly raw steak and drinking his third glass of red wine sitting down in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula or Arizona’s desert to read what his dear friend has written.

I’ve now read this slim book of poems twice and anticipate that next winter, I’ll begin again on November 9th and finish on March 20th comparing my walks in the pre-dawn Vermont countryside with those taken 27 years earlier by Kooser, just a few years older than I.