The Clearing
David Keplinger
Finalist for the Colorado
Book Award in Poetry from the Colorardo
Center for the Book
Finalist for the Akhmatova
Award for Excellence in Writing
"Like a match
struck in the dark, these stark uncompromising poems compress language
to an essential flare of meaning in he face of the undeniable–the
lyric impulse striking the hard flint of things. Keplinger's unerring
poetry confronts the intractable, the ways we do without, the subtractions
of survival, the ravaged Europe of memory. 'By dark,' he says of the work
of the scythe, 'we had made a little clearing.' Few can say so much."
—Eleanor Wilner
“An enormous
heart lies in these risk taking poems whose range, imagination and fresh
language always seek precision and the more difficult confidence of a
truth: ‘The house is a clearing for the human world.’ Both his
‘reconciliations with order and disorder’ are brilliant, and
by that I mean those very poems.”
—Mark Irwin
“The Clearing
is a distinctive collection of poems that seems to invent—before
our eyes—a new metaphysics in poetry. Although the poet most often
looks directly at the world, particularly the world of objective reality,
he holds that gaze too long for polite company, so that some underbelly,
some blue velvet version of things emerges. Like all truly original work,
David Keplinger’s new book is not an easy, or even a comfortable
read, and he demands much from the reader, especially in the face of startling
self-indulgences that he somehow manages to make blossom into a raw knowing
of our world that is ultimately seductive, and even wise.”
—Bruce Weigl
"These poems
enshrine the transcendental moment, but do so with a freshness of vision,
by tracing its peripheries, by aiming for undiscovred magic in scenes
that we'd normally overlook."
—Chad Parmenter,
Pleiades,
Vol. 27, No. 1
Praise for The
Rose Inside, Winner of the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize
“[David Keplinger] is an exquisite translator of event and emotion—empathy
is weighty here, and the light of a true tenderness is cast upon some
of the twilights of the world . . . This is a wide book and a deep one,
alive with marvelous composition and outcry. And yet, for all its zest
of expression it is real life and real feeling that is most honored.”
—Mary Oliver
New
Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903
W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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