Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems (Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry)

Jared Carter is another too-little-known American poet. Born in Indiana in 1939, he has lived in that state for most of his life, and much of his poetry is set in the Midwest and partakes of a rural Midwest ethos. Some of the poems are set in fictional "Mississinewa County" in the middle of Indiana along the actual Mississinewa River. (For the title of this review, I use the last two lines of the poem "Mississinewa County Road".)DARKENED ROOMS OF SUMMER (2014) contains poems selected from five of Carter's earlier books -- "Work, for the Night Is Coming" (1981); "After the Rain" (1993); "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" (1999); "Cross This Bridge at a Walk" (2006); and "A Dance in the Street" (2012). In addition, it contains about thirty new and previously unpublished poems. There are a total of 113 poems.Carter's poems seem to divide into two groups. One might be called Americana -- poems that speak of life in the American Heartland. The atmosphere of many of these is elegiac. Here is a sampling of the topics of these poems of Americana: Midwestern tornados; riding Harleys; relocating a cemetery to higher ground in advance of a dam-formed reservoir; foraging for ginger; the National Road; roadside crosses; touring Shakertown, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky; cicadas and galleynippers; swimming in a YMCA pool in "an ancient city of abandoned mills and red-brick factories"; and a Hoosier's encounter with Mosby's Confederate raiders at a covered bridge in the summer of 1863. The last two-mentioned poems are among the handful of "story-poems" in the book.The other poems are more meditative and philosophical in nature. And, in general, more elusive . . . a few so much so that I haven't a clue as to what Carter's point might be. Still, there are some keepers among these. Here is one, entitled "Reprise":Only an evening wind that comes at lastbefore sleep falls--a distant beckoningso long forgotten, out of dark rains past--wind that the scent of water lilies, massedand set adrift and softly gleaming, brings.Only an evening wind, that comes at lastand carries memory with it, anchored fastin the flow of things. Hushed imaginings,so long forgotten, out of dark rains past,or hands that rest now, in the aftermathof music echoing deep within the strings.Only an evening wind, that comes at last,that has no shape or form, nor earthly taskexcept to draw up from those hidden springsso long forgotten, out of dark rains past,an elemental motion. Hearing, we ask,and yet we know, beyond all reckoning--only an evening wind that comes at last,so long forgotten, out of dark rains past.One reason I choose to present "Reprise" is because it is so formal -- a villanelle, in fact. All of Carter's poems are formal to some extent, and some quite so (for example, there are seventeen other villanelles). But their formality rarely becomes obtrusive, in part because Carter's language is so natural and relaxed.While there may not be any really great poems in DARKENED ROOMS OF SUMMER, many are rewarding. And while Jared Carter may not number among the great American poets, he definitely is too little known.

If Ted Kooser never did another thing, we owe him a debt of gratitute for this collection. Some of these poems are written with a formal rhyme scheme, which is so hard almost nobody even tries it; others are free form. Some are unlike anything I've ever read anywhere. "Barn Siding" starts off with that mundane subject that flashes back on an entire lifetime--it blew the roof right off my head. I say this too much about books I like, but I really wish this was available in hardcover.

Gem after gem, in a variety of styles, all perceptive, craftsmanlike and worth reading again and again.

In Darkened Rooms of Summer, the first-time reader is introduced to a region which is at once literal and mythical, “Mississinewa County”, somewhere “east of Spoon River, west of Winesburg, and somewhat north of Raintree County”, as Carter himself describes it— a fictional county named for an actual river which, like the fictional town “Spoon River”, also named for an actual river, and like Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha County”, Frost’s rural New England (somewhere “north of Boston”), Robinson’s “Tilbury Town”, Jeffers’ Big Sur coastline, and a long list of other literary regions rooted equally in the American continent and the American psyche, Mississinewa County is a multifaceted, multidimensional “place” of such symbolic and allegorical richness that its hinterlands and far boundaries, despite several decades of appreciative commentary, remain largely unexplored. Darkened Rooms of Summer contains much of what one has come to expect in a regionalist work of literature from the American midwest: pool halls & funeral parlors, dilapidated barns & covered bridges, barbershops & taverns, and miles of highways, telephone poles & open country inhabited by farmers & druggists, drifters & drunkards, undertakers & real estate developers. Turning to any of the 113 poems in this collection, one is struck by the assurance and authority in the poet’s voice. Carter’s descriptions are rendered with a pitch-perfect precision that can only come from long familiarity with his subject. He is a plein-air poet, portraying his region with a sharpness of focus and an eye for inconspicuous but telling detail that cannot be achieved at second-hand.

Jared Carter is, without a doubt, one of the greatest poets of America. His clarity of vision, his contol of language offer a kindness and refuge in words that few equal and none surpass. This book is a gift to poetry.