Ice: Poems

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger's Iceindexes the findings from memory's slow melt-stories and faces we've forgotten, bones hidden in frost.

"I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this," Keplingerwrites. "You are asking that same question." In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernity-masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, "searching for a way to stay in pain forever"; a grandmother mending socks, "her face in the dark unchanging";Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia.

With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of what-and who-we've harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolf's head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a mother's phantom. "I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that I've misshapen,"Keplingerwrites.

Sois there "a point to all this singing"? Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolf's head can't, either. But sometimes, "out of the snow of confusion,"somethinganswers, "saying gorgeous things like yes." And the flowers "open up / their small green trumpets anyway."

I.

Ice 3
The Puppet Tiger That Masculinity Is 5
Canto 6
Almost 7
Near Yakutia 9
My Mother Remembers What Happened 10
Rocker 11
Irises 12
Lemming of the Ice Age 13
Ice Moons 14
Sketch of Wings in Gorham’s Cave 16
The Conger Ice Shelf Has Collapsed 18
Spartak the Lion Cub Lives under the Permafrost 20
Come and See 21
Traveling 23
At Osip Mandelstam’s Memorial Statue in Voronezh 24
Two Horses in a Field 25
The Ice Age Wolf That Love Is 26

II.

Chameleon 31
The Future of Desire 32
The North 34
Mirror, on the Night of Your Passing 36
American History in Místek 39
What It Could Be Like . . . 40
Adages for Dragons 41
Elation 42
Pomade 43
Small Pink Reading Glasses 44
Memory, a Snowfall 45
My Mother Reading Dickinson at the End 47
Erosion 49
Possess 51
American Thanksgiving in Místek 52
The Oar 53
The Fifteen-Year-Old Dog Surrender Is 57
Driving through Kansas at Night 58 Emerson 59

III.

Reading the Light Surrounding the Lark 63
Reading Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts 66
Reading Gilgamesh before Going to Sleep 67
Reading the Buffalo’s Face 68
Reading Jake’s Poems at the Southernmost Point 69
At the Museum of the Scalpel and the Ear Horn 70
Assembling the Bones into the Body of the Saint 73
At the Museum of Supernatural History 74
Reading James Wright in Martins Ferry, Ohio 75
Ghazal 77
Reading Light 78
A Hollyhock That Once Belonged to Stanley Kunitz 80
The Last Reader of the Poems 81
The Long Answer 82
Is 85
Sonnet 87

Notes 89
Acknowledgments 91

David Keplinger is the author of Ice and Another City. His collections of poems also include The Most Natural Thing, The Prayers of Others, The Clearing, and The Rose Inside. His translations include Carsten Rene Nielsen's World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors and House Inspections, a Lannan Translations Selection; his most recent translation is Jan Wagner's The Art of Topiary. Keplinger's work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, and The Writer's Almanac, and has been translated and included in anthologies in China, Germany, Denmark, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Keplinger has received support from the Soros Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Danish Arts Foundation. He has also received the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Colorado Book Award, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, and the Erksine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Keplinger directs the MFA program at American University in Washington, DC.

Praise for Ice

"From Dante to Blake to Emily Dickinson, the poems in Keplinger's latest book summon literary history (and geological history too) in an effort to understand modern life."—New York Times Book Review

“Keplinger’s Ice travels across time and space, both evoking the history of life on earth and focusing on personal losses, [. . .] There is an arresting intimacy to the icy breadth of this collection, a sense of something unvisited before."—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub

 “David Keplinger’s Ice is Seamus Heaney’s North for the twenty-first century, which is to say that it knows history’s reverberating circle, how we learn about our contemporary selves from what, of itself, Earth chooses to exhume. From ice: a body. From ice: evidence, or parable, or prayer. With the precision of a clockmaker, Keplinger twists a key and reveals the body-memory of a lost mother’s eyeglasses, the story a child’s thumbprint tells in a tub of pomade, the “pure love that dug deep” and preserved, in ice, a wolf pup for 18,000 years. In these tender, wondrous poems, the poet excavates Earth’s frozen archives of Anthropocene violence, preserved in the body, to remind us of the heft and joy of living.”—Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal

“Few books move me as wholly and profoundly as David Keplinger’s do. Aching and revelatory, Ice speaks to that part of us that wants to preserve our tenderness for this world and those in it. As the first poem considers the prehistoric wolf unearthed by the thaw of climate change, it asks ‘how the head got severed from the heart.’ As we turn the pages, the question invites us to examine our own history, our purpose, our legacy. The hurt, the poems reveal, is where we might come together to love the world and each other.”—Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure

“David Keplinger’s eighth book of poetry, Ice, reveals once again how he keeps returning to beginner’s mind to refresh his vision and his voice. In ‘Two Horses in a Field,’ he asks, ‘Is it the speechless speech / that makes their being here / together, unembarrassed, embraced, fill me with happiness?’ followed by, ‘I want to love the world like this.’ These poems are acts of love that come from and return to the silence that has seen it all and embraced all of it. There is no greater love than that. As I finished the book, I found myself deeply at home in this poet’s company. I believe that many others will find the same.”—Parker J. Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak

“Keep watch for David Keplinger. His poems, with their exquisite immediacy and valor, confront us with what we need to see: our intimate part in the fate of our planet. Yet even in the anguish, we experience the beauty of it, and feel a kind of redemption in the truth-telling. You will want all your friends to read this book.”—Joanna Macy, author of Active Hope

Praise for Another City

“Keplinger’s voices accumulate to a rich texture, inflected by literature and travel. I’ve rarely stood back in such awe at a collection’s ordering principles, its bone structure. These cities open their mouths and sing.”—Sandra Beasley

“The exquisite poems in Another City possess the weight and certitude of stone, yet break within one as geodes: their depths prismatic yet dreamlike, enigmatic yet also deeply familiar. From familial histories to Lincoln’s imperfect embalming, Marie Curie’s radioactive notebook to an examination of the ache of quotidian objects, there is a wholly radiant center to this collection, a dazzling multiplicity of cities and citizens, losses and revelations. The domes of these pages—both funerary and celestial—are those in which the great poets sing.”—Katherine Larson

“I cherish and am grateful for these poems, for the way the sweep of them disturbs me out of my complacency, and although I’m not certain as to who it is who tells me these poems, who sometimes even sings these poems out loud so I can hear them rise above the noisy hubbub of our lives, I know that he is capable of a powerful wrenching of the past into the painfully clear light of knowing, and I know that he, this speaker, presents—or illustrates, really—a frighteningly familiar record of someone confronting the essence of who he is in the world in the middle of his life without any reaching for self-praise or even salvation.”—Bruce Weigl

“Within the places (somatic, textual, geographical) that house us and those that we house within us, David—frank, compressed, darkly witty, and never far from a sense of mythic wonder—makes clear that the purpose of a pilgrimage is to locate in any ‘city’ the profoundly humane citizenry of the isolato. ‘[D]eath is not the subject of our portrait. / It is,’ he writes in ‘The City of Birth,’ ‘the knowing you are seen, / it is the lighting of one’s light, it is to take / a body, knowing you are not the body. / That’s loneliness.’ In what Keplinger calls, in another poem, ‘our days of faithless translation,’ we are beyond lucky to have Keplinger interpreting our steps with ardent, articulate compassion.”—Lisa Russ Spaar

“Like Joseph Cornell’s elegant and bewitching boxes, Keplinger’s poems are miniatures which reveal a universe. Although they begin in the quotidian, they are apt to end in revelation, made all the more resonant thanks to Keplinger’s exacting metaphors and unerring command of free verse craft. Yet he also reminds us, again and again, that revelation is by no means easy to come by. As he writes in one of the poems, ‘Now for the rest of your life / you are trying to be born / through a wound,’ a passage of Rilkean intensity which suggests that for Keplinger the stakes are very high indeed. Another City is his finest collection yet.”—David Wojahn

Praise for David Keplinger’s Translation of The Art of Topiary

“Keplinger’s translation seems to rise out of a love of language that’s almost mathematical in music and pace. Thus, each line is well made, composed of lyrical density and movement, and the reader experiences this—not as conceit, but as actual. Each poem feels alive with intention, teaching us how to listen to its music. Here control becomes part of meaning. The mechanics of nature—where the organic becomes metaphysical, or the natural sculpted—are primary to the collection. This masterful accretive affect works in The Art of Topiary. Jan Wagner’s vision has been exacted with care and know-how as Keplinger carries into translation the truth of a gesture, and this is where poetry resides.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

Praise for The Most Natural Thing

“Stunning and visceral . . . His prose is so well-crafted and compact that you’d think they wrote themselves into the world—that they were born complete and right on their due date, with no complications.”—The Rumpus

“Evocative and haunting, a meditation on memory and the body and desire. It is, for the most part, a very quiet book that relies less on big stunning moments than small details. . . . The fact that there is so much movement between the poems and across the book is remarkable.”—The Fiddleback

“A tender, graceful, and profound meditation on the ways in which we experience our bodies in the world; shuttling expertly between the narrative and the lyric, the ordinary and the wild, the book asks us to envision the body as that lived intersection between, as Keplinger would have it, the natural and the natural.”—Triquarterly

“Somehow this clever magical poet’s fervor brings to the page a splendor of humanism— the extension of wit, delight and cynicism. He’s at the top of the heap of the originals.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

Praise for The Prayers of Others

“The question is less whether Keplinger benefits from the prose poem than whether prose poetry benefits from Keplinger—a question The Prayers of Others answers with a resounding yes.”—American Book Review