Ted Kooser
In the opening paragraphs of Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes, “I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”
There’s an important suggestion behind those words: The author whom Thoreau seeks and admires makes an offer of his words to someone else. We might think that a transaction too obvious to point to, but there is a great deal of poetry written and published today that turns its back (sometimes with apparent disdain) upon the reader. During the past one hundred years of the Modern and now Postmodern ages, a great deal of our poetry has turned away from communication. At a poetry festival a few years ago, I heard a noted American poet say that it is the responsibility of readers to educate themselves to a level that they can understand what poets write. Thoreau would no doubt have scoffed at such arrogance.
One of my purposes in editing this series is to present the work of American poets who are doing their best to make gifts to their readers—to communicate, to charm, to persuade. Jared Carter’s Darkened Rooms of Summer and Connie Wanek’s Rival Gardens are just such gifts, as is this third book.
Fleda Brown’s book is indeed the sincere account of a life, though it is, to use Thoreau’s word, “simple” only in that it is open-handed and conversational. These are not simple poems by any means, but neither are they intentionally difficult. They don’t hide anything, nor are they coy, nor are they clever for the sake of cleverness, but they are indeed a life, offered to us with candor, care, and generosity, a life like yours and mine, in which challenges are faced and learned from. Brown’s successive poems, in book after book, offer us a record of a poet’s development first as a person and second as an accomplished literary artist.
The first poem here, “Fishing with Blood,” from Brown’s first book, shows us the poet as a child, curious and observant, attentive to her parents and the immediate surroundings, and “Mushrooms,” the last poem of the new poems, shows us the same attentiveness, but now the poet has grown older, and the protections of her early life have fallen back and away. You hold the first of these poems in your left hand and the last in your right, and in between is the carefully and beautifully presented record of the life of a talented and influential American poet. And a person who reaches, in welcome, to you.