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Summary: Making something special with it
Review: Fabric: the opening, dedicatory poem sketches a man's early morning walk along a road, a road that reminds him of an unrolled length of cloth, and the dark fields in the distance seem like the counter in the store his father worked at. He remembers his father behind the counter unrolling a bolt of cloth for the boy and saying "you can make something special with this." Kooser, fighting cancer when he wrote these postcards, continues to use his naturally metaphorical imagination to transform common things and daily events into well-timed and expertly sculpted poems. There are at least a dozen gems in this collection and memorable metaphors and similes on nearly every page. The postcards--poems no longer than a page, and mostly much shorter than that--form a diary of sorts, not only a response to and a subtle record of his battle with cancer, but a testimony to his joy in the heartbreaking beauty of existence. Kooser uses items from what Randall Jarrell called "the dailiness of life" to slide back to the past and to clarify the present. The "material"--his father, his mother, his uncle, roadside refuse, the moon, birds, graveyards, robes, a snowflake, the creaking snow, bolts of cloth--is embroidered beautifully and succinctly. This book will lodge in the memory and engender respect for the overlooked yet rich fabric of our daily lives.
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