The Wheeling Year

Book excerpt: Ted Kooser sees a writerOCOs workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, whatOCOs jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pultizer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. "The Wheeling Year" offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of AmericaOCOs most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him. a"