Treehouse: New & Selected Poems

The State Poet of Nebraska culls selections from 11 prior collections (including Going Out, Coming Back, 1993) and adds new poems liberally. Kloefkorn is consistently accessible and restrained, practicing his art without artifice, drawing mainly on autobiographical material about the family of his Kansas youth, especially his brother, in well-crafted poems that sound a deep tone of remembrance, lightened with humor and wisdom. Themes and images recur: the brothers killing barnswallows by slingshot; ""a butterfly snag in a windowblind""; there's a barefoot woman in a peach slip; and a specific Lincoln street revisited. Kloefkorn writes, ""behind each great public event/ lies the small private one/ ...that/ truly matters, that endures"" and filters WWII through his youth as a paperboy delivering the Wichita Beacon. Frequently mixing disparate elements, he continues to make the commonplace new, as in ""Outage"": ""When the power/ in a blink returns/ we sit silent and stunned,/ seeing each other again/ in such a quaint and altogether/ different light."" (Dec.)