David Keplinger - Böcker

WINNER OF THE UNT RILKE PRIZEHow does it feel to experience another city? To stand beneath tall buildings, among the countless faces of a crowd? To attempt to be heard above the din?The poems of Another City travel inward and outward at once: into moments of self-reproach and grace, and to those of disassociation and belonging. From experiences defined by an urban landscape—a thwarted customer at the door of a shuttered bookstore in Crete, a chance encounter with a might-have-been lover in Copenhagen—to the streets themselves, where “an alley was a comma in the agony’s grammar,” in David Keplinger’s hands startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare.Yet Another City deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. In these poems, our entry into the world is when “the wound, called loneliness, / opens,” and our voyage out of it is through a foreign but not entirely unfamiliar constellations of cities: Cherbourg, Manila, Port-au-Prince.This is a rich portrait of the seemingly incommunicable expanses between people, places, and ideas—and the ability of a poem to transcend the void.

The Long Answer gleans from David Keplinger's five previous poetry collections, covering two decades of his engagement with the lyric narrative. Through echoes of Dickinson, Rimbaud, William Blake, and the French prose poet Max Jacob, as well as a host of other European and American voices, this volume maps the ongoing 'long answer' to the poet's individual inquiries about family, influence, and originality while at the same time tapping the source and substance of a more far-flung, philosophical problem. How is one life both distinct from and the sum of lives that came before? How does one disentangle oneself from the illusion of separateness? Culling together the best work from those previous years, and with nearly forty new pages of material, The Long Answer seeks a question, in Keplinger's title poem, "so old, no one remembers/ what was asked for/in the first place,/and which leaves us . . . /with only each other." His work, here, and historically, seeks less to alter thinking than to undrape it, where poetry can be the means of remembering what we are.

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger’s Ice indexes 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,” Keplinger writes. “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,” Keplinger writes.So is 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,” something answers, “saying gorgeous things like yes.” And the flowers “open up / their small green trumpets anyway.”