In his eighth volume of poetry, Ice, David Keplinger moves into that land of past time, where the earth is frozen, turning his curiosity to the relics embedded there as well as to moments and objects ossified in his own history. We see the poet peering into the world’s earliest formations in the last ice age, and excavating what is buried there. These poems act further as the locus for encountering the poet’s lodestar of past and future, within a rhythm that moves us forward into the unknown space between the dead and the living. This is a reimagining of the earth’s prehistoric past and the earth’s climate in its alternation between ice ages and relenting greenhouse periods, whereby aspects of life are frozen, preserved, and retrieved. But the poems extend far beyond a museum of curated artifacts of natural history. The poetry encompasses universal themes of love, death, and revival that transcend time, while reflecting in human terms the metaphor of global warming, uncovering the secrets of history that have propelled Homo sapiens into a position of world domination. For me, Ice is an homage to fragmented forms of ancient life solidified in ice and lost to the living world, a requiem.
At the same time, Keplinger’s poetry retains the elegiac dimensions of his personal losses submerged in the poetical unconscious, accessible only through imaginative prospects. Keplinger alludes to a slowly eroding repository of what has been left to the past, surfacing in fragmented, painful memories. Encapsulations of personal experience are juxtaposed with the immensity of the five significant ice ages dating from billions of years ago to the most recent glaciation period, where various animal remains are dug out of the ice. Keplinger is a collector, piecing together the past with the present, remembering, and returning life back to the realm of the long-dead.
Keplinger’s lyrical style has been influenced by his translations of international poets; he is the principal translator of the Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielson. The poems in Another City (2018) are about childhood, balanced by commemorative historical pieces, written both from fact and through fantasy, and always in an effort to bridge the artifact with its imaginative context. Regarding craft, his graceful but spare lines are attuned to the musicality of sound, while respecting the pause between words, a careful tending to the what-is-not-said. In Another City, he takes his great grandfather’s copybook, dating back to the Civil War (he fought for the Union, only to be incarcerated for desertion after his discharge papers were stolen.) This injustice allows the speaker to take the voice of the young man who is also ancestral elder, connecting the communal and the personal past.
In another poem, “Steel,” from Another City, the speaker reflects on talking to a policeman in charge of gathering the mutilated body parts of the dead in the towers, and his ability to distance himself emotionally through science and objectivity. Finding the dismembered thumb of a child, both poet and policeman reflect on the catastrophic implications of bodies blown into pieces, and the morbid task of piecing together the identity of the victim. The policeman, however, has a change of mind, allowing his emotions to match his horror, pointing to another body lost in the steel of the building that collapsed: “My friend is a good man / with a gray punctured face. / / His body was poured / / from concrete.” He then continues, “There was a mandible…there was a bolt of / someone’s skin, the fabric / unraveling from the arm.” This attitude is similar to Ice’s reassembling of decayed remains of the lemming in “Lemming of the Ice Age”:
“Let us see how specialness / / Survives past death. The hind legs of broken and internal organs / /Black folds inside. It was a little child / / who dug it up … like at the exhumation of the murderer or the saint, / / some skin has yet to dissolved.”
This is simultaneously a poetics of dissolution and of reassembling the metonymic pieces of the whole in order to regain that semblance if life in both lemming and human being. The most significant element, a particularly emotional one for the poet, is the representation of who that person was, the way the fantastical animals preserved in the permafrost had been buried and retrieved. In Ice, the archeological dig into the permafrost aims to put together the fragments — and that process is identical to the language of trauma, since trauma does not follow the linearity of ordinary language. The actual experience of time is “within-time-ness” the only experience of temporality we can know. However, in trauma there is an erasure of temporality in which one is thrust into without-time-ness which is precisely what Keplinger does by synthesizing global and human trauma.
Ice is divided into three parts, each onet combining the fantastical imagery of the prehistoric age with autobiographical narratives. The opening poem, “Ice,” begins with the discovery of the “severed head of world’s first full sized Pleistocene wolf,” setting the mood for the book. The poet finds himself doing what poets do — interpreting the events of the world through an interior lens, and opening up the preconscious. So that in seeing the head of the wolf, having unearthed what was supposed to be the search for a “mammoth tusk,” the speaker is confronted with what looks like the birth of an infant or child pulled from “soppy gummy earth” with its “hardened points of fur” that begins an association with an intimate memory lost until the moment of the visual spectacle of this fantastical creature’s head, and the poem suddenly swerves to “you”:
… You wanted a child. I don’t know
Where that question got buried in my body.
The wolf head lived on top of its body
In the valley on the river and we cannot know
How the head got severed from the heart.
The head is severed from the heart, just as the speaker’s recollection leads to his own separation of mind and his heart when it came to bringing an innocent child into this endangered world; hence, even in the dismemberment of the wolf, “the head stayed / intact, as it still is, as it feels its way now, / the heft and size of a child. Cocked sideways / in its question on the shoulders of the world.” This rueful tone ushers in a sobering consciousness, of what happens when homo sapiens occupy and damage the earth,
Preservation—the exhumation of the remains of an animal species from fifty thousand years ago, whether wooly ringworm, wolf, buffalo, or the wings of a bird — extends beyond the cataloging of primitive forms revealed by climate change or the assaults on the ecosystem of Siberia’s Yakutia region. The poems both excavate and recover loss, manifested through despair, grief, and even glimpses of homage.
Through the recession of the permafrost, Ice eschews the impulse to curate current knowledge of natural history or to engage expertly in scientific discourse. Rather, Ice points to a “relearning of the world” through a consideration of the nature of the world as not outside of ourselves, revealing that (as Emerson wrote) “the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” These poems are wondrously crafted, whether pertaining to biological history or to the poet’s parents, and they honor progenitors such as Mandelstam, Kunitz, Dickinson, and James Wright.
In “The Ice Age Wolf that Love Is,” a canine pup, discovered from 18,000 years ago, is called Dogor by the scientists; the name means “friend.” There is yearning not only for the affection and loyalty of the dog descended from the wolf, but a beseeching: “Dogor, don’t freeze again. Don’t fight me or take flight into / a thousand motes of ice. Dogor, don’t bite./ / Remember what you are. Leap into mu face. Doze / in the crook of my big-boned shoulder. Stay Dogor.”
In “The Puppet Tiger that Masculinity Is,” digging is less archeological and more psychological, pertaining to origins but also to the intimacy of father-son relationships, where the father was both fearsome and fearful at the same time. The puppet tiger, like Blake’s engraving of “The Tyger,” is really gentle, one that would not inspire a child not to fear but to tenderness. For the poet, it begins and ends with history: “It takes them exactly the length of my life / until they come across it among leaves falling / in the eighteenth century cursive against the sky.”
Section two of Ice develops the interlocking themes of elegy for a lost world and lamentation over the deaths of loved persons. Perhaps the most poignant among them is the son’s retrieval of his mother’s small reading glasses, in “Small Pink Reading Glasses.” Here is the poem in ientirety:
American thing,
you are not nearly invisible, folded up
like a bow tie, with the grease
of my mother’s nose still impressed
on the plastic nubs. How do you
do, metallic drugstore throwaway
that I deemed important
to keep, more so than her glazed
Japanese vase I remember as muted,
as gray as the glaucomic curtaining
which, after several rounds of bows,
she stepped behind.
That “which is left behind” cannot be kept any more than we can keep the remains of dead species of the Ice Age. We can only find what would be hidden or no longer of use. But these glasses resonate with the son’s memory, more valuable and indispensable than the expensive Japanese vase. Similarly, the poet’s elegy for his father recalls his face in a window frame, the smokiness reminiscent of an X-ray, as the mourning son seeks a deeper understanding of the father. Most significant, for me, is the reference to how unconscious memory. buried at the bottom of the frozen iceberg, is largely inaccessible to the preconscious except through the process of writing poetry or daydreaming. Hence,
… He will come out
Again, in gloved hands again, which from my window
Will be carving the fin of an enormous black fish
he descends, on top of memory.
In the concluding two sections, there are two poems about Emily Dickinson. Unlike Thoreau or Emerson, Dickinson lived in the in-between-ness of knowing and not knowing, and Keplinger’s beautiful elegy for his mother, “My Mother Reading Dickinson At the End” serves as a negation of finales, and a threshold to openness. So many of Dickinson’s poems end with listening — for consciousness. Her concern was to be attentive, observant, so that death was culmination and not the cessation of life. Keplinger writes of his mother’s lying in bed upstairs with “her hands on her chest” while reading Dickinson, whom she called “This person.” The speaker interprets her mother’s identification with Dickinson as a way towards endless awareness, even with no object or purpose in view, alone with consciousness, between the ticks of the clock. The speaker then hears her coughing as a sign of her living, something to listen for: “her sleep was interposed / With dashes . Holes and tubes / coursed out into November and the night.” Yet there is the paradox: in so many of Dickinson’s poems, we close on the dash — that questioning, that lack of resolution, that can only be hope or faith.
In the third section, Keplinger reveals the importance of presence (rather than the present), concentrating on what is “is” as he writes in “Reading the Light around the Lark,” a reference to the Emersonian ideal of all things contextually related as a whole, rather than in fragments or parts: “It was the lark / and it has always been / a lark.” The lark is imperishable, because unlike human beings, one lark is not distinct from another, because they lack personality, not that they are deathless — but they are eternal. To truly regard the lark requires a certain freedom from bias or subjectivity, and a wish to evade self-crediting. He is suggesting that we are all frozen in universal ice, and to be free of it entails letting go of resentment and transcending self-interest:
If you will chisel
what is not you, carefully,
you will know
that each is still bewildered
and desiring to stay
in what it must believe
Is the only world, the one
that is safe,
The real one.
It is rare to read a book of poetry as variegated as this one, and find the poet come to a change of mind. As the permafrost represents unconscious memory, frozen below the surface, Keplinger has managed to use a formal and scrupulous language to express the relics of the unconscious, and in doing he has recovered a lost world in entirety.
[Published by Milkweed Editions on August 8, 2023, 96 pages, $16.00 paperback]