Mar 21 2008
The Blizzard Voices ~ ted kooser
I came across this little gem while browsing through the bookstore on my birthday. The Blizzard Voices is by former poet laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser. Like Out of the Dust, this is a narrative told through poems. Unlike Out of the Dust, these stories are true accounts of a blizzard that ripped through the Great Plains for a few days in January 1888.
In the introduction, Ted Kooser says “The poems that follow are isolated voices heard in that blinding snowstorm we know as the passage of time. When the Alberta Clipper, roaring out of the north, rips apart a straw stack, only the frozen center remains and each of these memories is like that center, stripped of digression, picked clean of equivocation. What is left are the core narratives, spare and cold. Each clings to a concrete and specific detail, for memory works like that.”
The poems are titled either A Woman’s Voice or A Man’s Voice depending on the narrator of the event. Simply told are the tragedies next to the miracles that took place during that winter storm. It’s haunting in it’s brevity, but also in the reality that these things really happened. If you are looking for poetry that is accessible, this book would be a good place to start. But be prepared. When you have finished, you will sit and think for awhile about the fragility of life.
These poems were performed as a play by the Lincoln, Nebraska, Community Playhouse.
I think that we would understand and remember more of the past if it could be presented in such eloquent but simple ways. The base of this history are the true experiences of men and women who lived this event and told about it. Ted Kooser has taken those stories and shaped them for us.