Ted Kooser’s Short, Sweet Summer Reminiscence

By Jenny Shank, 8-31-09

Lights on a Ground of Darkness
by Ted Kooser
University of Nebraska Press, 60 pages, $10.95

Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, popular essayist, former United States Poet Laureate, and proud Nebraska citizen, has reached the stage in his career where he can publish anything he wishes to, whether or not it fits into a standard category.  And that’s a lucky thing for readers, because it’s difficult to know what to call his Lights on a Ground of Darkness—a novella-length memoir, maybe?—but it’s a wonderful little book, studded with insights and arresting images about Kooser’s mother’s family, German-Americans who lived in the little town of Guttenberg, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi.  The prose is so full of sensory detail that it transports the reader to this simpler time and place, where the social highlight of a summer week was a lively neighborhood pinochle game on the screened porch.

In the preface, Kooser elegantly describes the dilemma of a writer who wants to record a family history: “This is a book I put off writing for more than fifty years because I wanted it to be perfect, which it is not and could never be.  In almost every family there is someone like me who desperately wants to write such a story and is forever kept from it by fear of failure.” Kooser finally wrote this story in 1997, when his mother was dying.  “She was the last living member of her family, and before she was gone I wanted to show her how much I had loved them,” Kooser writes.  She was pleased with the story, and Kooser first published it in the Great River Review. 

While Lights on a Ground of Darkness doesn’t have the typical length of a memoir, it has the depth and heart of a much larger book.  Kooser’s love for his family is evident in every sentence, as is his continued mourning for them.  Kooser often writes in present tense about long-dead family members, which underscores how vivid they still are to him.  But he never sentimentalizes; his observations about his loved ones are sharp enough to make a stranger able to perceive them in three-dimensions. 

When Kooser was growing up, his grandparents ran a filling station and looked after their grown son, Kooser’s Uncle Elvy, who “has cerebral palsy and is wholly dependent upon his parents and upon a community that accepts him as its own.”

Fishing is Elvy’s favorite pastime.  It makes him feel proud, it’s clear, to bring a gunnysack full of fish back for the family’s dinner.  Elvy walks through a cornfield to reach his fishing spot every day.  “The corn in that strip of bottomland belongs to another man,” Kooser writes, “but my grandfather each summer chops a path through it for my uncle to follow the river, a trail just wide enough to keep him from getting his fishpoles entangled as they thrash from side to side” due to Elvy’s awkward gait.  Throughout the book, Kooser revisits a summer night in 1949, when he is ten, and his family serves bluegills that Elvy caught for dinner, then prepares for pinochle night.

The book drifts gracefully from these remembrances of that particular night, to different tales out of family lore, to an old letter from Kooser’s grandfather.  At one point Kooser searches census records at the courthouse.  “The oak door at the entrance weights a hundred pounds and swings on brass hinges a quarter of an inch thick.  One does not draw open such portals with a frivolous heart,” Kooser writes.

Kooser’s reflections on how difficult it was to hear music a century ago are also incisive.  “There was a time when music had to be sought out like honey in a hollow tree.  There was no radio as we know it, with hundreds of stations playing music twenty-four hours a day.  If you wanted music you either made it yourself or hitched up the horses to the farm wagon or buggy and drove to a place where you might find it…Music was worth more then.”

By the end of Lights on the Ground of Darkness when Kooser recounts the death of his grandmother, grandfather, father, and Uncle Elvy, you feel it, even though you’ve only known these people for the time it takes to read the book’s few dozen pages.  When Kooser’s mother dies, fifty years after that pinochle night, he writes, “She has left me to reckon with a rapidly fading past that will, from the day of her death forward, be, as Edwin Muir described it, little more than a confusion of lights on a ground of darkness.”

Kooser weaves images of the irises that grew in his family’s gardens throughout the book.  Near the conclusion, he waits for them to bloom: “Their petals are tightly furled, spun into tight little cones of rich color, yellow and blue.  Within a day or two they will be open, lush and loose, spilling their fragrance, old irises from these green hills, their gnarled roots borne from house to house, from garden to garden, down through time.  An iris is forever young because it has no stories to sadden it, to weigh it down.”

I recently transplanted the tubers of some of my grandmother’s prize-winning irises from her Nebraska garden into my backyard; her garden is diminishing now, as she cannot care for it as she once did.  Kooser’s book reminds me why I love irises above all flowers—they are as frivolous as any other flower, I suppose, but they are packed with history, because they multiply and the only way to keep them thriving is to divide and share them.  When irises bloom, they are young again, just as the people Kooser writes about are when he shares his precise observations.  Any reader who has ever considered writing his own family history can read Lights on a Ground of Darkness and be inspired.