clearingThe Clearing

$14.00 paper | 85 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-930974-51-7
Publication Date: April 2005
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A Green Rose Book

“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.”
—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

David Keplinger

keplinger-david

David Keplinger is the author ofThe Rose Inside, which won the 1999 T.S. Eliot prize, The Clearing(New Issues), and The Prayers of Others (New Issues). His essays, translations, and poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, The American Voice, and many other journals. He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Katey Lehman Foundation. Keplinger teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.