Tag: poetry
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A chair in snow
One afternoon not long ago, as I was walking in a local gym, I watched a student shooting hoops in an unusual way. On the fingertips of his right hand, he held a basketball. In the palm of his left, he held a cell phone. After taking a single-handed shot, and before the ball had…
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An unexpected lightness
In the summer of the year 2000, I had the good fortune to be spending the month of June in Ireland, where I was teaching Irish literature to American students at Trinity College, Dublin. One sunny afternoon, as I was walking down Nassau Street in central Dublin, I stopped to browse at a sidewalk bookstall.…
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Wrens’ nests
In the opening lines of his poem “Gauze,” Ted Kooser, a former Poet Laureate of the United States, asks a provocative question: “Can a man in his eighties, with cancer, / be happy?” In the remaining lines, he provides a tentative answer: It seems that he can, cutting yesterday’s gauze dressing in pieces…