World Book Day is on the 23rd of April. In the UK it takes place on the 2nd of March to avoid clashes with spring school holidays and St. Georges’ Day.

A fellow poet introduced me to the American poet Ted Kooser, now in his early 80s. His style is accomplished, yet extremely simple. My current bedtime reading is his poetry collection Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001).

In the late 90s Kooser developed cancer. He gave up his insurance job and writing. When he began to write again, it was to paste daily poems on postcards he sent to his friend and fellow writer Jim Harrison. In the preface, Kooser tells us ‘I began to take a two-mile walk each morning. I’d been told by my radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity, so I exercised before dawn, hiking the isolated country roads near where I live.’ These country roads are in Nebraska.

The poems cover a period from 9 November until 20 March. In the poems Kooser doesn’t directly talk about the illness. He does so through metaphor. All the poems include a brief description of the weather. The clear and precise observation gives them a haiku quality.

Here is his postcard for march 5:

Very windy and cold.

A flock of robins bobs in the top
of a wind-tossed tree,
with every robin facing north
and the sky flying into their faces.
But this is not straightforwardness,
nor is it courage, nor an example
of purpose and direction
against insurmountable odds.
They perch like this
to keep their feathers smooth.