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As the excellent critic Dana Gioia has remarked (Can Poetry Matter? [1992]), Kooser is a popular poet in the sense that he speaks of nonliterary experience in nonliterary language. You don't have to know literature or literary manners to get a lot out of his poetry; it's not highfalutin. Because he writes of such ordinary things as noticing the weather, suddenly remembering one's own past, and imaginatively projecting our human consciousness into other creatures and even things (see "A Heart of Gold," the "protagonist" of which is a bottle of beer), he runs the risk of sentimentality, of letting emotion overpower reason and observable reality. But sentimentality rarely gets the better of him, and to anyone familiar with the great, regular middle of North America--Kooser was born in Iowa but lives in Nebraska--the scenes and actions in his poetry (especially the way that, in several poems, light--the quintessential physical reality on the plains--is a virtually corporeal actor) will seem, to paraphrase Pope, things often seen but ne'er so well observed. Ray Olson

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