GREAT LINES:

Open the shoe-store door

and a bell rings:

two shoehorns on a shoelace

.
.

Purely as an image it’s a homely one, a handcrafted welcome/alert that the door activates as a customer enters, or exits; the customer hears the bell and looks up, the tongue-shaped shoehorns ringing against each other, the stout shoelace knotting them loosely in place. We are accustomed to hearing a door chime in a retail store, but rarely notice the bell. Among fourteen words chosen for the poem “shoe” appears three times, each time part of a compound: shoe-store, shoehorn, shoelace. Although the word doesn’t hit the ear with a bell-like sound, it recurs in a bell-like fashion, the ringing of repetition. The sh-sh-sh hints at a shoe-like shuffle, perhaps, not out of place in a shoe-store. Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser wrote the poems of Braided Creek in a collaboration not quite spelled out. Let’s reject the “continuing cult of personality,” they say, telling readers it doesn’t matter which of us wrote what. If you know their work already (both Harrison and Kooser have many books of their own) you may be able to tease out one style from the other. Harrison writes novels and to me some of the pieces suggest prosier habits, for example. But, never mind. Braided Creek is a pleasing meditation on a quieter life, often nature-surrounded, wisdom in crafted, palm-sized bits, some fleeting thoughts, many amusing observations, a series of small events, haiku-like in their simplicity and precision. “The butterfly / jots a note on the wind / to remind itself of something.”

Check the BPL catalog for this title: Braided Creek