Weather Central (Pitt Poetry Series)

by Ted Kooser

published

September 27th 1994 by University of Pittsburgh Press

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binding

Paperback, 104 pages

isbn

082295527X (isbn13: 9780822955276)

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Sheila rated it:

12/28/07

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: Nebraska Poetry lovers, and of course Kooserites

Weather Central truly contains some rich work that also demonstrates Ted Kooser’s diversity in topic and form. My particular draw to the poem, City Limits, arrives out of Kooser’s simultaneous lament and salute for a way of life that has all but disappeared. Yet, we can see the direct connection between this piece and the works we’ve been reading throughout the semester. I think for me, I found in this poem an explanation as well as affirmation for many of the characters we’ve read—...more Weather Central truly contains some rich work that also demonstrates Ted Kooser’s diversity in topic and form. My particular draw to the poem, City Limits, arrives out of Kooser’s simultaneous lament and salute for a way of life that has all but disappeared. Yet, we can see the direct connection between this piece and the works we’ve been reading throughout the semester. I think for me, I found in this poem an explanation as well as affirmation for many of the characters we’ve read—an aesthetic appendix to the canon.

The author so carefully captures the gradations of life as it evolves on a prairie backdrop in which he is both an omniscient reporter as well as a subjective participant. Through his descriptions of struggle, as in the line, “…cattle dying, the children sick, the limits always ahead like a wall of black mountains,” I see the arrival of Cather’s O Pioneer’s cast arrive on the virgin plains. This lamentation of death and disease echos the pain of hardship as “generations spilled out,” on to the prairies settling “for limits,” stunting the growth of their own migration by stringing “fence wire,” drawing “plat maps with streets squared…” (36).

Wright Morris' characters in Plain Song, Cora and Emerson all seem to be the owners of the “dead weight” trunks that thud “onto the platform bursting their leather straps.” McMurty’s dried up little Texas town becomes the “generations” that “spilled out” of that untimely railroad dropping. And then the poem tells us how “the frontier rolled on ahead”—without them. Kooser, however, at this point in the poem provides for us what Inge, McMurty and others did not: an explanation for their discontent. Kooser suggests that there was something against their nature in the act of settlement. “Our hearts had never been in it, this stopping: we wanted a no where but gave ourselves over to gardens.” Is he insinuating that the nature of man is always that of wanderer? A hunter and gatherer self domesticated? He says, “What we’d done to the Indians happened to us.” This stanza suggests Euro-man has failed by virtue of his own self-betrayal.

Just at the folks of Thalia are bitter, envious and resigned to the life they’ve designed for themselves they “thrive on the failure of others.” Kooser confesses on their behalf that “we never caught up with what ever it was…”, and as the “horse grew heavy and lame,” we understand the metaphor that unveils the sad spirit of surrender.
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Weather Central (Pitt Poetry Series)

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