The Rev. David von Schlichten is a graduate (1997) of this seminary and pastor of St. James Lutheran Church, Youngstown, Pennsylvania.

He authored "Kiyoshi 'Uncle John' Watanabe: Brace Samaritan Smuggling" in Witness at the Crossroads, a 2001 collection of biographical sketches of those who took up a leading role in public life from the Gettysburg Seminary. He expects the publication of a chapbook of poetry this year, entitled "Poedifier."

Delights and Shadows
by Ted Kooser, 2004, Copper Canyon Press, 87 pp.

Reviewed by Dr. David von Schlichten

During my years in the parish, numerous parishioners have stepped forward with original works of poedification. One woman wrote a poem about her father that she had me read at his funeral. A twelve-year-old girl wrote a poem in honor of our congregation’s bicentennial. A groom read an original poem to his bride at their wedding. While many of us are averse to much “literary” poetry, most of us embrace a certain amount of verse, especially at liminal moments.

One lovely, dusky and deep source of poetry is Ted Kooser’s Delights and Shadows, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in April of 200. Kooser also is the Poet Laureate of the United States. These poems are approachable and full of concrete, earthy imagery many of us will be quick to appreciate. Here lies poetry available, relevant, enjoyable.

Delights and Shadows is warm, quiet, and pensive. The fifty-nine poems lead the reader to a Nebraskan world of big wilderness surrounding small towns, where there is real, albeit subdued, joy, a solid sense of family, and a profundity many are aware of but few can verbalize. Kooser creates a vivid realm both intimate and transcendent.

    Two short poems illustrate well this realm. The first is called “A Winter Morning:”

            A farmhouse window far back from the highway

            speaks to the darkness in a small, sure voice.

            Against this stillness, only a kettle’s whisper,

            and against the starry cold, one small blue ring of flame.

Note how this poem creates both a Rockwell-esque scene and also a sense of finitude and even danger. There is the delight of the farmhouse, the kettle, and the voice, as well as the

de-light of the blue flame. There is also the shadow of remoteness, darkness, stillness, and starry cold. The resolution between delight and shadow is realism about mortality coupled with a still, small sturdiness.

            The second example is “Starlight:”

                        All night, this soft rain from the distant past.

                        No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.

Again, Kooser blends the tastefully sentimental with the sober and even mysterious, but never in a way that eclipses hope. He maintains a wise delight/shadow dialectic reminiscent of the Lutheran understanding of Law and Gospel.

            There are other ways that Kooser’s poetry connects to Lutheran theology. The poems’ sense of hope and joy amid suffering and death reminds one of the theology of the cross. In addition, some of the pieces deal with such topics as eternity, grace, and prayer. One poem speaks of how faith is often cast out of one house only to be welcomed at another. Another poem, “At the Cancer Clinic,” describes two younger women helping an older one, a cancer patient, to walk to the examining rooms. The going is slow, but the women show great patience. The poem concludes with these lines: “Grace / fills the clean mold of this moment / and all the shuffling magazines grow still.” Lines such as these can bolster preaching and meditation.

            Critics often compare Kooser to Wendell Berry, although the former is not as religious in his poetry as the latter. In any case, readers will find much in Kooser to enjoy and that stimulates the edifying contemplation of life’s most crucial themes, including God and religion.