In the last few years, news outlets such as The Siberian Times have been reporting small revelations, heralded not by trumpets, but by a quiet thawing. As permafrost recedes due to rising global temperatures, remarkably well-preserved animals dating from the Pleistocene, as varied as a roundworm and a woolly rhino, are surfacing in Russia’s Yakutia Republic. Dispatches from prehistory and bleak reminders of the effects of climate change, in David Keplinger’s Ice, these haunting finds are also a catalyst for understanding a past closer to home.
The first section of Keplinger’s newest collection includes subjects such as a Neanderthal engraving, a mummified lemming, and a cave lion cub. Through the poet’s lens in “The Ice Age Wolf that Love Is,” an 18,000-year-old canine pup whom scientists call “Dogor” is a multi-faceted metaphor for loss, longing, and redemption. While the poems in Ice are generally marked by tenderness, this is especially true of pieces honoring those mammals who barely had time to live before they were hidden by ice, and who are therefore simultaneously tens of thousands of years old and too young to be orphaned.
The poet’s compassion and curiosity are also applied to moments and objects from his own history in the book’s opening section. “Canto” describes an attic full of family artifacts, each with a story to tell. “Sometimes the luggage spoke to me,” Keplinger writes, and in “Two Horses in a Field,” he asks whether it is “the speechless speech” of the animals’ presence that fills him with happiness. There are references to language, the mouth, and the tongue throughout this book, most directly in “American Thanksgiving in Místek,” which opens, “When I say tongue: I mean tong, for reaching and grasping,” and concludes, “When I say tongue I mean tank, rolling on / treads round the gutter and the palate of the mouth. When I say thank, / I mean take.”
Keplinger is the principal English translator of the Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen, whose deceptively conversational prose poems deliver fantastic turns and imagery. Keplinger uses this form himself exclusively in his 2021 collection, The World to Come, and we find it again in Ice: in the Thanksgiving piece, the multi-part “Ice Moons,” and in “Adages for Dragons,” whose wry strangeness resembles a surreal fable, with lines like, “On their sewn-up leather cheeks my shoes weep white laces all night.”
Ice also contains poems in stanzas and playful variations of received forms. “Ghazal” has expected elements such as the repetition of a word at the end of lines and a final self-identification (the piece deftly closes with “me”), but instead of couplets, we have a block of text in which the poet’s first name itself is the refrain. “Sonnet” is composed of two quatrains and two tercets, but the rhymes are slant and the final line severely truncated, neatly representing the empty space it describes. While there may be less assonance and alliteration in Ice than one might expect from a poet who is also a musician, Keplinger’s subtlety with sound is effective and his use of meter adept.
In its second section, Ice delves more deeply into memories. Events, relationships, and objects are presented for contemplation, vibrant even while in stasis. In “The North,” Keplinger writes, “what happened there, // seems to float in place” and asks, “Why did this memory / never sink?” The poet’s younger self appears in “American History in Místek” as “still a small child sleeping,” and in “Pomade” as “the child I was, now extinct.”
Masterful tension pervades Ice: especially between what is hidden and what is revealed and between the observer and the observed. “Emerson” describes the photo of a grandfather working in a barber shop nearly a hundred years ago, a customer seated before him. Keplinger uses the moment to illustrate the challenge of being both the living actor and the witness:
How to hold the beautiful, at the moment of its startling?
To be that barber, to become that customer at the same
time. One must look down and do the work. One must
keep still and watch it all unfolding in the mirror.
The final section of Ice continues an investigation of the strata of the self through an eclectic inventory, with Keplinger reviving mementos such as his childhood bedroom, his late mother’s reading glasses, an enigmatic dairy farm buffalo, and a stork’s nest precariously balanced on a radio tower. The section is also a kind of pilgrimage, with stops for “reading” literary heroes in places associated with their work: Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Jake Adam York at the Southernmost Point, and James Wright in Martins Ferry.
Within each poem in Ice lies the silhouette of something waiting to be perceived in wonder, even when the feeling is tempered by sorrow over the object’s original loss or the circumstances of its discovery. This is most explicit in “Reading the Light Surrounding the Lark.” The bird in the poem is over 40,000 years old; having been chiseled by toothbrush from the permafrost, Keplinger tells us, it “fell upward to our world,” and he suggests we apply this same method for self-discovery: “imagine // you have chiseled part / of you away,” to find “a succession / of your childhood bodies.” He calls us to fall upward, like the lark, out of previous iterations of ourselves and into understanding:
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.
Keplinger holds a certification from a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Program and leads guided meditations for AU’s Mindfulness Initiative, and this new collection reflects a practice that emphasizes compassion and awareness. “I want to love // the world like this,” he says in “Two Horses in a Field,” and, “Even as I ask / this of myself, I am starting / to become myself.” In “Is,” a poem that distills the verb and praises “its gorgeous consolation,” he says, “Let curiosity be prayer.” Thus, while the groans of a glacier calving are easy to miss beneath the kaleidoscopic soundtrack of the Anthropocene, and while Keplinger says of the collapse of the Conger Ice Shelf, “why / did I not hear this commotion,” it is evident that he is paying attention, and not only has perceived something of what the world has to say but is carrying the message to his readers.
Ice is alchemical, combining seemingly disparate elements to produce something new and unexpected. This is true of individual poems and of the collection as a whole, thanks to Keplinger’s curation: here are exhumed animals from the Pleistocene, here is a tank-sized facsimile of a beach, here is Emily Dickinson’s piano. Emergent properties arise from each of these pieces and from the book itself, representing more than the sum of the poems’ parts. What the reader brings to the experience is, of course, the final ingredient; but Keplinger’s skill provides both the spark and the space to facilitate transformation.
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