Aby Kaupang, & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love

 

seals are what bullets ought be

sooted sheen & mooring drift hymn

casing dissolves to driftwood
casket to gunmetal wave

if there is an angel of death
there’s  pontoon grace to land her

 

ash is a color of  the mourning sea

 

 

seals are what bullets ought be

 

buoyed lash  & slowly lute song

bell & horn atop an inlet
a shatter in a barrel

measure   warning   rhythmic

I’m quite taken with Fort Collins, Colorado poet Aby Kaupang’s latest, her & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love (Anderson SC: Parlor Press, 2023), winner of the new measure poetry prize. According to the back cover, this is Kaupang’s fifth collection, although I’ve only seen her debut, Absence is such a Transparent House (Huntington Beach CA: Tebot Bach, 2011) [see my review of such here] and her collaborative NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) (with Matthew Cooperman; New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2018) [see my review of such here], so I’m clearly behind on her stunning, meditative lyric. The poems in & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love are incredibly expansive, set as a suite of long poems in a book-length ongoing lyric on grief and erasure; long lyric threads composed out of space, precision and heartbreak. “her mouth was closed,” Kaupang writes, as part of “g-tube, lightning & excursion,” “I thought it was a moment & / & then a pre-moment // but the passing of her closure isn’t yet [.]” & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love includes eight full-colour photographs of sculptures (including on the cover) by James Sullivan, set through the text as illustration, or counterpoint, offering further evidence of this as a book of physicality, of living and being, and of loss, grief and disappearance. “I too am a part of the core of the world,” Kaupang writes, as part of the extended “recovery,” “the seems of my spine glued & stitched [.]” I’m amazed by the expansiveness and heartbreak of her lyric across such a wide canvas, a wide space; the ways her narrative threads are dismantled even as they unfurl, to reveal the bare bones of heart and heavy feeling.