Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps

"The quietest magnificent book I've ever read," says author Jim Harrison on the cover of Ted Kooser's Local Wonders. Cross Annie Dillard's incisive observations with Erma Bombeck's outrageous knack for finding humor at the kitchen table, tone it down, round off the edges and you have something akin to Kooser's sweet cadence of story telling.

In a place in southeastern Nebraska close to Lincoln and not far from Omaha lie the Bohemian Alps, a tongue in cheek name for the low rolling hills in the dusty prairie, as well a tribute to the early Czech and German immigrants who settled Nebraska. Ted Kooser, two term Poet Laureate of America, artist and former insurance salesman, was born in Iowa and settled in Garland, Nebraska after retirement. The town of Garland is located in the Bohemian Alps.

Local Wonders is an account of Kooser's unhurried life in Garland mixed in with memories of the past and reflections on the future. Divided into four seasons with the Bohemian Alps as the backdrop, the book takes us through his life and places that have the veneer of placid ordinariness.  With gentle humor and quiet deftness Kooser reveals excitement, anxieties, love, loss, happiness and disappointments amidst them - the warp and weft in the fabric of any life. In doing so, he utilizes "wolf vision," the ability to detect the slightest change in one's surroundings and life's rhythm. Kooser doesn't make any earthshaking observations but he has a keen sense of what matters. He manages to find breathtaking beauty in nearby landscapes, dignity in the uneventful lives of neighbors and forgotten history at abandoned mines and crossroads. Nothing is too large or too insignificant for Kooser's attention. The vast prairies, a trapped insect, the quirky personalities of domestic and wild animals, a mice and spider infested barn and an outhouse that needs some care in using; they are all fodder for Kooser's ruminations and satisfaction. But with an artist's eye, he sees beyond the obvious. In the supple limbs and practiced strut of a shimmering aqua clad teenage rural drum majorette, he catches a flash of the tired middle aged farm wife. In his parents' peaceful midwestern lives, he remembers the anxiety of post depression era immigrants. In the death of a bachelor uncle he notes the parallels with the dignified resignation of a dying elephant.

A Czech saying adorns the fly leaf of Local Wonders.  It reads: "When God wishes to rejoice the life of a poor man, he makes him lose his donkey and find it again." At the end of the book we discover how Kooser lost his donkey and then rejoiced in finding it again. The donkey, he tells us is his will and ability to write poetry. But the most striking thing in the book is the author's serene joy in discovering new facets of familiar surroundings.  He describes it in the following paragraph.

The Joslyn Museum in Omaha owns a 1948 painting by George Ault called August Night at Russsell's Corners, portraying two old buildings and a section of road illuminated by a single hanging light. One side of a red building to the left is lighted, one side of a white building to the right. The road curves slightly, as indicated by a painted center line, and abruptly vanishes into the darkness. Recently I was asked to submit a poem about a favorite picture for a book and I chose this painting. It seems to have a simple premise: old buildings that in daylight would be so familiar that a person living in Russell’s Corners wouldn’t even notice them, become exotic and mysterious in the light from a commonplace bulb. Ault made four paintings of this same midnight crossroads, each from a slightly different angle, some showing a third building. But their effect upon me is identical. I can feel my will joining with that of the feeble light in its struggle to push back the darkness, darkness that has already begun to affect and alter the familiar, making it strange and exciting.  I wrote:

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it new
you need never
leave home.

Local wonders.

(A glimpse of Russell's Corners here)

My enjoyment of Kooser's book was enhanced by my familiarity with the region of Nebraska described in it. Writing the review also provides an opportunity to post a 1995 painting of mine here - A Tribute to Nebraska.

(click to enlarge)

Comments

[Sujatha]

Lovely writing- I'm most definitely ordering my own copy, it's not available in the local library, unfortunately.

Also, another cat quote alert : from the book, the Bohemian saying "The cat makes sure whose chin it may lick" (page xv).

That's a beautiful painting, Ruchira- I really love the sense of sky (which we unfortunately never see quite as much of, here in the valleys and hills, the abstraction of the corn field(?).Is that lunch pails in the farm workers' hands?

[Ruchira]

Sujatha,

You might enjoy this book a lot. You too have a penchant for noting the unusual and the humorous in the midst of the humdrum.

I am very fond of this painting because I was able to create the impressionistic look that I had hoped for. The skies indeed are spectacular in the flat lands of Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma where you can see for miles and when you drive, you get the feeling of approaching the edge of the earth in the horizon. I have seen some fabulous things in the skies of the midwest including a golden (literally) twilight in Oklahoma which lasted for about ten minutes before sundown and like the light bulb in Ault's painting, transformed everything into a magical world.

But notice in the preface of Kooser's book that you have linked to, that Nebraska is not technically flat although it is mostly all in one plane. The land tilts like a draining board from the Rockies towards the Missouri River at the border of Nebraska and Iowa.

Yes, those are lunch sacks in the hands of the young farm boys. The alternative title of this painting used to be "Lunch Hour In the Prairie."

[Becki]

I too love the painting! It is by far my favorite of all your work I have seen. I love impressionists' work and this is excellent!

[Ruchira]

Thanks, Becki.

Do you also remember the skies in Oklahoma around sunset? That golden twighlight I described in the last comment was from when you and I were both in Quail Creek. It happened suddenly one evening - as if gold dust had become suspended in the air. Even the insides of the house acquired a glow for those few short minutes. I can never forget it just as I can't the red earth of Oklahoma.

[Dean C. Rowan]

Viewing Ruchira's painting reminded me of a poem that Ruchira has noted in e-mail correspondence really fits the Ault painting to which Kooser responded with his poem. I thought of one of Donald Justice's American Sketches:

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town of Ladora
At 3 A.M.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on

When I mentioned this to Ruchira, I added:

"There is no obvious reason why this poem should have come to mind, but it must have something to do with my perhaps mistaken assumption that Ladora is a midwestern town or at least much like a town one would find in Nebraska. I suppose your attention to Kooser, too, drew me to poetry. In any case, both the poem and the painting are very lovely. I hadn't realized until just now that the Justice poem is an exercise in constellating darkness with significant moments of light: a town completely dark, 'except' for the diner, 'but for' the headlights and the window. Your painting in its own way features sparkles and sweeps of light in a field of darkness."

Now, after viewing the Ault painting reproduced in Wikipedia, I see stronger affinities with the Justice poem, although Justice is clearly associating light with individual lives illuminating the darkness, where Ault emphasizes the abstract geometrical patterns of a scene in the absence of a human being.

[Sukrita]

I really like the reference to the "wolf vision" in the review, Ruchira, which comes subtly so close to what I discern in your painting as well...the expanse of the skies juxtaposed with the "ordinariness" of the lunch sacks in the hands of the two human figures amidst the quiet sunlight of the afternoon. I'd love to read Kooser.