"Cortez Arrives at San Juan de Ulloa"
from David Keplinger's
The Clearing

David Keplinger:

David Keplinger's first book, The Rose Inside, won the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. His essays, translations, and poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Green Mountains Review, 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 elsewhere. Keplinger currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Colorado State University-Pueblo. (Photo by Tim McGettigan)

About The Clearing:

"Like a match struck in the dark, these stark, uncompromising poems compress language to an essential flare of meaning in the 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

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