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

"Jared Carter's poetry is pure, home-spun Americana, full of small-town people and places in the tradition of Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson."-Portland Book Review * Portland Book Review * "Those of us who practice the craft of poetry will want to keep Darkened Rooms of Summer close at hand, so we can study these poems, and wonder how Jared Carter ushers us so seamlessly into his world, and thus, more deeply into our own."-James Crews, basalt -- James Crews * basalt * "Jared Carter writes the kind of poetry that death does not touch. He brings us a very different atmosphere from this crazy techie world, with a command of metaphor and the bones of memory that do not lie. We trust this poet's vision."-Grace Cavalieri, danmurano.com -- Grace Cavalieri * danmurano.com * "[Jared Carter] is the rare poet who is rooted in a certain place, which is of course Indiana, yet [he] deals with it in such a way that it is of universal interest."-Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts -- Dana Gioia "[Carter] writes American poetry the way that William Faulkner wrote American novels. . . . [Carter's poems] have the homespun flavor of our native music-ballads, country blues, and sweet, clear, understated lyrics."-Sally A. Lodge, Publishers Weekly -- Sally A. Lodge * Publishers Weekly * "Carter's is a poetry of a resolute middle distance, firmly of this world: between the dust under the earth and the dust of space there exists the place that the poem can illumine."-Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books -- Helen Vendler * New York Review of Books *

For nearly half a century, Jared Carter has been quietly mapping the American heartland. Line by line, his poetry has shown us the landscape, sounded the voices, conjured the music, and tested the silence of the ever-changing and yet ever-constant Midwest that figures so prominently in the American story. And yet what we find in Carter's poetry is endlessly new. Here, in poems selected from his first five books, is the summer-long buzz of the cicada and the crack of the cue ball, the young rebel on his big Harley, and the YMCA secretary who backstrokes her way across the indoor pool. Here, too, are thirty new poems in fixed form that illustrate Carter's continued quest for a poetry of "universal interest." Taken together, these selections are, truly, poetry in the American grain. Jared Carter lives in Indiana. He has received the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Poets' Prize, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.