Reticent drama …

… Ted Kooser's 'Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems' Review | National Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What remains unspoken behind Kooser’s lines creates drama. The mystery of “Abandoned Farmhouse” is downright arresting. In this fractured home, a “Bible with a broken back” rests, “dusty with sun.” A large man once lived here, but he was “not a man for farming, say the fields / cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.” He had a wife and child, and they struggled: “Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves / and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.” They survived harsh winters, rags stuffed into window frames, but “something went wrong.” Cellar jars, sealed and filled, suggest a quick exit — and so do the child’s toys “strewn in the yard / like branches after a storm.”