Ice

Reviews / Votes

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

"The sustained invention of a tinkerer who takes his materials (so many of them fragile, easily discarded or mislaid) to heart even as he finds his humor, his consolation in the spirited play of their arrangements."-Antioch Review