Thursday, March 31, 2011
A Room in the Past
In "A Room in the Past", Kooser talks about specific memories of his grandmother in a kitchen that he has grown very fond of. He talks of "a morning light so bright you can't see beyond its windows in the afternoon" (3-4), and of "dishes jingling up in the cupboard" (6-7). He remembers specific details of the kitchen, because it was directly related to his grandmother. Kooser then fills the second half of the poem with contrasting images, creating almost a duality in the poem. "No one's at home in this room, its counter is wiped, and the dishrag hangs from its nail, a dry leaf" (10-13). He fills the reader's heads with another image, one of emptiness and no life. This image is cleverly used in contrast to the happy-go-lucky image in the beginning, to show Kooser's sort-of depression that his grandmother has passed away. "..she put them all back in their places and wiped out the sink, turning her back on the rest of us, forever" (17-19). He is obviously bitter and unaccepting of his grandma's death. Even though he sees that the kitchen is empty, he believes that she had a presence that she left there, but she abandoned it through her death. I believe Kooser is trying to show how hard it is to overcome death and its effects on family members. Kooser sees a gap where something lively and caring once was.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletesome interesting observations, though I wouldn't call it "happy-go-lucky" at the beginning; there is actually a consistency of tone throughout. There is an almost blinding clarity, a desire, a futile yearning to fix time--though of course it can't be; the image is at once brilliant and annihilating. It is important to consider the image, here--the way the room "falls" away through time, yet is imagistically fixed, and the sense of the grandmother as absent even when she was living, carrying out her quiet service, her duties--and yes a sense of her as perhaps having withheld, of the speaker's desire to hold on to what can't be held on to--mist, blue rain, a ghost, the kitchen an empty set, an empty memory, and that truck of the speaker's desire that perhaps keeps yanking it back...
ReplyDelete