Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems

by Ted Kooser

Overview

The publication of Ted Kooser's Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems is a literary event of major importance. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accessible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822979265
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	08/05/2013
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	428 KB

About the Author

Ted Kooser was named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006. He was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939. Kooser was educated in the Ames public schools, at Iowa State University, and the University of Nebraska. His awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia magazine, and the 1981 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry for Sure Signs. His poems have appeared in many magazines including the Antioch Review, the Hudson Review, and the Kenyon Review.

Hometown:

Garland, Nebraska

Date of Birth:

1939

Place of Birth:

Ames, Iowa

Education:

B.S., Iowa State University, 1962; M.A., University of Nebraska, 1968

Table of Contents

Contents Selecting a Reader First Snow An Old Photograph The Constellation Orion The Salesman Old Soldiers' Home Self-Portrait at Thirty-Nine August At the Bus Stop Next to the Funeral Home Visiting Mountains The Leaky Faucet The Soul of Twins A Frozen Stream Living Near the Rehabilitation Home Late February A Drive In the Country Spring Plowing Sitting All Evening Alone In the Kitchen Sure Signs The Skeleton In the Closet A Summer Night In a Country Cemetery In Iowa The Man With the Hearing Aid The Very Old Walking Beside a Creek Book Club At the End of the Weekend Uncle Adler In the Corners of Fields How to Make Rhubarb Wine Late Lights In Minnesota The Afterlife A Widow So this Is Nebraska Fort Robinson How to Foretell a Change In the Weather Snow Fence In an Old Apple Orchard An Empty Place In the Kitchen, at Midnight After the Funeral: Cleaning Out the Medicine Cabinet The Grandfather Cap Shooting a Farmhouse Beer Bottle Sleeping Cat North of Alliance Late September Carrie For a Friend Grandfather Looking for You, Barbara Pocket Poem Moles Notes On the Death of Nels Paulssen, Farmer, at the Ripe Old Age of 93 Advice After My Grandmother's Funeral A Hot Night In Wheat Country Five P.M. Abandoned Farmhouse The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise Furnace West Window Boarding House The Geek A Letter from Aunt Belle At the Bait Stand The Tattooed Lady A Death at the Office There Is Always a Little Wind The Widow Lester Houses at the Edge of Town The Old Woman A Place In Kansas Tom Ball's Barn My Grandfather Dying The Red Wing Church Highway 30 Birthday The Failed Suicide A Hairnet with Stars The Goldfish Floats to the Top of His Life They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office A Presidential Poem Year's End New Year's Day A Dry Winter Letter to Friends Walking to Work Sunday Morning About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Kooser is the master of the short poem.  I found it impossible to put Sure Signs down until I had finished the entire book.  It is a pleasure to read a poet like Kooser whose imagination is naturally metaphorical.”
—Hudson Review


“Ted Kooser’s Sure Signs could well become a classic, precisely because so many of the poems are not only excellent but are readily possessible.”
—Black Warrior Book Review

“Sure Signs is complete and mature work of poetry.  There is little in contemporary poetry that can compare with it in excellence. . . . I find myself surprised at its freshness, the purity of the writing, its open-eyed honesty, its humor and kindliness, its strength of character, its overwhelming sense of place, and so much more. . . . I see it as a lasting work, comparable to the best of the Spoon River or Frost in his richest vein.”

—Karl Shapiro

“We had known, some of us, that Ted Kooser was good, but how good this substantial volume tells.  He  has, with his wit and his earthiness, his imagination and his lucidity, staked out as his own a region—western it is—somewhere poetically between Frost and Williams (he shows us, to our surprise, how close they were).  It is, in short, a volume we can all feel—and we will in the indefinite future—grateful for.”

—Theodore Weiss

“[These poems] are evocative of loneliness, friendships, great distances, the value of things usually disregarded and of lives usually unsung; and all this in a way that is pecularly American.”

—Denise Levertov

From the Publisher