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

 

seals are what bulletsought be

sooted sheen & mooringdrift hymn

casing dissolves todriftwood
casket to gunmetal wave

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

 

ash is a color of  the mourning sea

 

 

seals are what bulletsought be

 

buoyed lash  & slowly lute song

bell & horn atop aninlet
a shatter in a barrel

measure   warning  rhythmic

I’mquite taken with Fort Collins, Colorado poet Aby Kaupang’s latest, her &there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love (Anderson SC: ParlorPress, 2023), winner of the new measure poetry prize. According to the backcover, this is Kaupang’s fifth collection, although I’ve only seen her debut, Absenceis 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, meditativelyric. The poems in & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to loveare incredibly expansive, set as a suite of long poems in a book-length ongoinglyric on grief and erasure; long lyric threads composed out of space, precisionand 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 thrillhour of the world to love includes eight full-colour photographs of sculptures(including on the cover) by James Sullivan, set through the text asillustration, or counterpoint, offering further evidence of this as a book ofphysicality, of living and being, and of loss, grief and disappearance. “I tooam 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 theexpansiveness and heartbreak of her lyric across such a wide canvas, a widespace; the ways her narrative threads are dismantled even as they unfurl, toreveal the bare bones of heart and heavy feeling.