Ted Kooser, The Wheeling Year
Ted Kooser’s The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book has been a favorite on my reading list this year. He doesn’t claim “poetry” for these prose pieces, but they sound like poetry to me. I mean to give the book to a friend, to make a gift of it in all its luscious detail. Instead, I keep carrying it around and not giving it, rereading and writing out these meditative pieces in my own notebook.
Here is one from February:
Maybe we carry too much through the door from the past, propped open with a broom that has swept up so much sentiment it has bent to the shape of its sweeping — like a stiff old floor-length skirt still waltzing — then across the wide porch where those we love, living and dead, sit rocking and talking, all drinking longnecks and laughing together, none of them offering help.
Then over the grass, box after box, to the rented U-Haul that is our life, already stuffed with all we haven’t been able to part with, stale with dead dreams and packed so hastily we will never be able to get to the wisdom we lugged out early and loaded on first.
Twenty-nine dollars a day is the going rate, about what a person could live on if he had to, and the past is right there in the rearview mirror, following close, painted with slogans, its springs bent down from all we ever were. (8)
My introduction to poet Ellen Bass was courtesy of Garrison Keillor’s 
Even though I seriously intended, long before poetry month began, to participate in the Great Poetry Giveaway commemorating National Poetry Month, I put off the communication necessary, and it’s now too late to be “official,” on 
1) Signed copies of my TWO books, Sparrow, published in 2012 by Big Pencil Press, and winner of the Gell Poetry Prize; AND The Coyotes and My Mom, published in 1989 by Bellowing Ark Press (and now out of print). If you already own my books, you’re still welcome to enter the drawing — you can give your new copies to a friend.