Ted Kooser | Published Works

Published Works

Ted Kooser has published a number of books of poetry.

Book Cover	Title	Date	Description/Review	Links
	Valentines	2007	Valentines collects Kooser’s twenty-two years of Valentine’s Day poems, complemented with illustrations by Robert Hanna and a new poem appearing for the first time.	Buy from Publisher
	Flying at Night	2005	Flying at Night is a new compilation from University of Pittsburg Press that will include poems from Sure Signs and One World at a Time.	Buy from Publisher Excerpt 1: Flying at Night
	The Poetry Home Repair Manual	2005	Much more than a guidebook to making and revising poems, this manual has all the comforts and merits of a long and enlightening conversation with a wise and patient old friend—a friend who is willing to share everything he’s learned about the art he’s spent a lifetime learning to execute so well.	Buy from Publisher
	Delights and Shadows	2004	For more than thirty years Ted Kooser has written poems that deftly bring dissimilar things into telling unities. Throughout a long and distinguished writing career he has worked toward clarity and accessibility, making a poetry as fresh and spontaneous as a good watercolor. A gyroscope balanced between a child's hands, a jar of buttons that recalls generations of women, and a bird briefly witnessed outside a window — each reveals the remarkable within an otherwise ordinary world. — Poetry Daily	Buy from Publisher Excerpt 1 : At the Cancer... Excerpt 2 : Father Excerpt 3 : Skater Excerpt 4 : Tattoo
	Braided Creek	2003	There are poems on the natural world, aging, dying, friendship, love and eros. There is abundant humor. ... There also is distilled wisdom. — Houston Chronicle	Buy from Publisher
	Local Wonders, Seasons in the Bohemian Alps	2002	“This is a heartfelt, plainspoken book about slowing down and appreciating the world around you.” — Janet Maslin, CBS Sunday Morning	Excerpts Buy from Publisher
	Winter Morning Walks, 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison	2000	This is a compilation of short imagistic poems that Ted sent as postcards to his friend, Jim Harrison, while Kooser was recovering from cancer treatment.	Order from Publisher
	Weather Central	1994	Kooser's virtues are those traditionally ascribed to the Midwest: plainspokenness, modesty, common sense. He sits on his porch, uninterested in academic cant or the fashions of poetic schools, and takes in the world around, praising its quiet beauty....Kooser has always been an archeologist of sorts. An abandoned schoolhouse, a deserted forge, an old stoneware crock — all set him wondering, trying to reconstruct the lives of those who used them. Even in his earliest published poems, the elegiac note came naturally to Kooser, both celebration and lament for a way of life that was disappearing as farm families moved to the city. — The Bloomsbury Review	Buy from Publisher
	The Blizzard Voices	1986	A dramatized poetic narrative of the devastation unleashed on Nebraska Territory by the great blizzard of January 12, 1888. Drawn from the reminiscences of the survivors: the men and women who were teaching school, working the land, tending the house... when the storm arrived and changed their lives forever. Illustrated with twelve line drawings by Tom Pohrt. — from the jacket
	One World at a Time	1985	In the closing poem of this new collection, a spider brushes globes of dew from her web, "one world at a time." Since Ted Kooser's poems first began to appear in print, some twenty years ago, they have moved, as he has said, "from job to job, from love to love," with great patience and care, as if each poem were a miniature world that needed completion before being left to stand alone. — from the jacket
	Sure Signs	1980	"I found it impossible to put Sure Signs down until I had finished the entire book. It was like sitting next to a box of chocolates before dinner...a collection alternately delightful and mysterious." — Dana Gioia, The Hudson Review	Buy from Publisher Excerpt 1 : Carrie
	Not Coming to be Barked At	1976	Kooser's third full-sized collection of poems. Many of these were collected into SURE SIGNS in 1980.	(Out of Print)
	A Local Habitation & A Name	1974	This was the first of Kooser's books to receive national recognition, being favorably reviewed in SATURDAY REVIEW and elsewhere.	(Out of Print)
	Official Entry Blank	1969	This is Kooser's first book of poems, published when he was 30, by the University of Nebraska Press.	(Out of Print)