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Page 27 November–December 2007 Gardner continued from previous page with the mundane or domestic), each carefully and compactly rendered. The overall effect is one in which both kinds of detail are thrown into relief—the extraordinary coming to seem less incredible, and the ordinary more fantastic. Consider this untitled poem from The Prayers of Others: The clothesline where the fugitive hung his prison shirt. A finch came and stood on the shirt’s bloody shoulder.All night it stood there. The people in the house got up and made the beds. The father hammered something in the upper room. The shirt hung on its little equals sign between the house and open field, one sorrow and another. Here, the proximity of a fugitive and his bloody shirt gives an event as routine as making the bed dramatic tension—it seems nothing less than amazing that people would continue with daily rituals while danger is just outside their door. At the same time, the presentation of the prison shirt invites us to think of it more domestically, a piece of laundry rather than something far removed from our own spheres of experience. All of these details are then heightened and finally unified by the last line of the poem as it equates the house and the open field, the home dwellers ’ realm and the fugitive’s, as two sorrows. Prose poetry is old enough to be wearing thin its own conventions. At their best, poems like this one in The Prayers of Others achieve a clarity akin to that of photographs taken on high contrast film. Keplinger’s exacting attention to detail prospers in the prose poem, benefiting from the self-contained quality of the form. Images such as “He sat behind the X his legs had marked, unsocketed” or “With its forelegs it wiped one feeler down, the way a boy wipes down a spear” might seem overwrought or melodramatic if given the added tension of line breaks. Their presentation within a prose poem, however, allows for a more straightforward delivery. Unfortunately, Keplinger’s matter-of-fact treatment of images, though his chief strength, is also his greatest potential weakness. It requires a distance that at times can seem more reporterly than poetic, an effect that is exacerbated by the lack of line breaks. Take, for example, this piece: Instead of rain, it poured green horseflies, eardrums, teabags, and the complete works of Sigmund Freud. Luckily we had the awning up. Our conversation on the triune structure of the brain was not disturbed. “We are part reptile, part ape, part fool,” she said. Just then Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious knocked down all the wine from out of nowhere. Here, the details work less well together than they did in the clothesline poem. Rather than feeling like images that have been purposefully crafted together to cast new light on one another, these details feel a bit like testimony being read in court. What saves this poem and the handful of others like it is Keplinger’s deft use of a final, compelling image. In this case, the suddenness of a book knocking down wine (whether the book materializes as part of the rain, or the wine does, or both, remaining a mystery) pulls the rest of the poem taut. It is startling, and like the fugitive in the previous example, it prevents us from being lulled into inattention. Prose poetry is old enough to be wearing thin its own conventions.The techniques made popular by giants of the form, absurdism in the case of Russell Edson and surrealism in the case of Robert Desnos, have become so prevalent as to seem intrinsic to the form. It is difficult to think of successful prose poems that do not contain some hint of these elements; Robert Bly’s “Warning to the Reader,” comes to mind, but as a notably singular exception. Keplinger too tries his hand at surrealist imagery, as in the first poem of the collection where he writes, “I landed in the lion’s gut, and the gut was melted butter; its kills strung high along the cursive of its vertebrae.” Lovely writing, to be sure, but...

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