The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets by Ted Kooser

This has been an odd year. I have yet to be really caught up by any great novels--oh, I have read a few good ones, but nothing like last year's The Book Thief.

Instead, I have been reading poetry and poetry how-to books. And maybe that is the problem. I have started working on my own poetry with a vengeance and naturally want to fill my brain with books of this sort.

So, I just finished The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser for the second time. He is so wonderful to read. He believes in poetry readers can understand. Now that is a change from high school. Remember when you had to write papers on what a poem was about? What a chore that was. And here is Ted saying that it should be self-evident what a poem is about. We should write for the people we want to be our readers and whoa, our readers are usually normal human beings who don't have to write a paper to pass senior English.

Another thing to like about this book is that it has a feeling of kindness. As if you are sitting in a kitchen with your favorite uncle having a coffee and he is telling you what he thinks about poetry and quoting examples from memory of verse he really loves. He makes you want to try your hand at writing a poem just by his warm regard for you as a writer.

And his advice is sound. Something as simple as not using an ampersand (&) in your poems because it will stop the readers dream is perfect, because it is right. I have read poems with & in them and my eye does catch and I do wonder for a split second, why is this in here.

I think that if you are looking for a lot of technical information and exercises for writing poetry, then this is not the book for you. But if you want a prod in the right direction, this is one of the best. And if you don't plan on ever writing a piece of poetry in your life, but you want to read some poems and understand the process a little better, this is a very good place to start.

Below, I reviewed one of Ted's poetry books and there is a sample of a poem he wrote. His work is charming. As ex-Poet Laureate of the United States, you would expect good things from the pen of Ted and he delivers on that promise.