Saturday, May 31, 2003
By STEVE BYRNE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry" by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press, $15)
It's a bit of a truism that a brush with mortality can sharpen the senses to life's little pleasures, but that concept is illuminated to great depth in "Braided Creek," an excellent collection of poems by Nebraska poet Ted Kooser and Michigan man of letters Jim Harrison.
The two are longtime friends, and when Kooser was diagnosed with cancer in the late '90s, the two began corresponding via short (even tiny) poems, more than 300 of which are collected in this slim volume.
Most of the entries are just three or four lines long, and the majority are in plain spoken, observational language, wandering in tone from melancholy to amused to thoughtfully awestruck. Nearly all of them display a keen eye for the beauty of the everyday, particularly as it relates to our connection to the cycles of nature. "Come close to death/ And you begin to see/ What's under your nose," is succinctly representative.