Splitting an Order Paperback – November 29, 2016 by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press)

This is a beautiful book. Kooser is a good and careful poet, a master rather than a genius. He has a keen eye, a tin ear and a compassionate soul. He is capable, time and time again, of opening our eyes to the sacredness (i.e., the existentialist relevance) of ordinary objects and events: an old man in a cafeteria splitting a sandwich for his wife with trembling hands, a father and his son in neckties walking hand in hand in a nondescript parking lot, a collection of forgotten objects in a estate sale, waiting, as it were, for a second chance in a different place, two lovers meeting after many years and leaving their old grievances unsaid, a zinc lid that did its job and is dying as things do, slowly, a fish tank rotting inside under the indifferent sight of a young couple in a bad marriage,...

I read this book in a plane, drying my eyes shyly from time to time. "I want to be better at carrying sorrow. If my face is a mask, formed over the shadows that fill me, may I smile on the world like the moon," writes Kooser in a short poem of this beautiful collection. This book teaches us just that: to better carry our sorrows and memories, to understand that what it seems ordinary a few years back it was not so ordinary after all.

Hailed by Library Journal as "a master of the single-metaphor poem," Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling poet Ted Kooser calls attention to the intimacies of life through commonplace objects and occurrences. This collection—ten years in the making—is rich with quiet and profound magnificence.

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half
. . . and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

Ted Kooser is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon), which won the Pulitzer Prize. A former US Poet Laureate, Kooser serves as editor for "American Life in Poetry," a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper column.