Kelley Pujol Writes: A Review of Ted Kooser Essay

A Review: Ted Kooser’s Small Rooms in Time
By Kelley Pujol

I will begin with a disclaimer: I am a fan of Ted Kooser. I loved Delights and Shadows, and I am about to dive into The Poetry Home Repair Manual. Plus, I just like him as a guy- I like his checked shirts, and the way he sold insurance for thirty-five years while writing poetry before going to work each morning. There is something lovely about a working stiff - an insurance man - winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Many times I have imagined a woman with curlers still in her hair, a cup of coffee at her side. She is glancing at the paper while a man in an undershirt sits across from her with his cup of coffee. He’s reading the sports page, and she says, “Remember Teddie Kooser who sold you the policy on the Buick?”
“Yeah, what about him,” the man responds.
“Well, Teddie has won the Pulitzer.”…
I could go on from there with my story, but you get the idea. The past and the present cross over in funny, inexplicable ways, and that is what Small Rooms in Time is about. Mr. Kooser opens the paper one morning to discover the horrific murder of a fifteen year old boy (along with other member’s of the boy’s family) has occurred in the home he once occupied with his ex-wife and his son. At the time this discovery is made, Mr. Kooser is involved in creating a miniature replica of his current wife’s childhood home. He states that he “began to think about the way in which the rooms we inhabit, if only for a time, become unchanging places within us, complete with detail.” This is a profound observation that gives voice to questions that I have often asked myself. Why we can see places and people in dreams that we could never remember when we are awake? What is the hold that a place has on us? Why is one place better than another? Why are some places irreplaceable, and even if the physical place remains, the feelings do not?
Mr. Kooser sends a copy of the article about the murder to his ex-wife, Diana. He felt he needed someone else to feel his shock, and it had to be someone who knew they had carried their new born son through the same door where the murder had taken place. Mr. Kooser then goes on to cut to the chase and put into words the unspeakable fear of every parent: “If my luck in life had been worse, I might have been that other father, occupied by some mundane task, perhaps fixing a leaky faucet, when my son went to answer the door.”
Mr. Kooser acquaints us with the other inhabitants of his past neighborhood, and then lets us know that they are all now dead. He states beautifully, “I’ve noticed lately when I’ve driven past that the porch has begun to slope toward the street, as if to pour our ghosts out the front door and onto the buckled sidewalk.”
Sometimes events do occur that cause our past to be somehow thrown back into the orbit of our lives through no effort of our own. Mr. Kooser captures the feelings of those moments when we must confront the ghosts that have been poured into our laps. More often than not, we long to embrace them, quickly, before they vaporize again.

Read about Ted Kooser’s latest book, Valentines, at NPR.org and hear him read from his work: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18990762
Ted Kooser’s essay is from The Best American Essays: 2005 edited by Susan Orlean, series editor, Robert Atwan.