Monday, October 08, 2007
Newly Arrived in DC: Poet David Keplinger
Beginning teaching this fall at American University is poet David Keplinger. He is the author of The 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.
Welcome, David! A poem:
Waking on the Pribor Train, Near Freud’s Birthplace
I hear before I see.
Halfway through the rain-wet
Fields of Pribor in winter,
Some distant, barking dogs
Suggest the town.
I have heard tell
Of its shops with names
Predating the war
When this was a Jewish city.
I have found it all this way
Like a cup or a pocketknife
Or a hat from childhood
I thought was lost.
Illumined by the station lights
The tiny veins
Flicker behind my eyes,
And I open my eyes:
It’s like floating back into the world
After prayer. The moon
Is out. The dogs are slick
And fluid in their tight, black fur.
From The Clearing by David Keplinger
