Eric Pankey

In his eighteenth collection of poetry, Eric Pankey continues his forty-year investigation into how and what one can know in this world and beyond it. The poet, Jane Hirshfield, says about his poetry, "Eric Pankey is a poet of precise observation and startling particularities. His wisdom, sometimes sidelong, sometimes direct, both knows and feels. The soundcraft is superb, the modes of investigation by turns lyrical, surreal, meditative, allegorical, direct-speaking, and allusive."Perception and the phenomenology of perception are central to the concerns of these beautifully austere poems. "Nothing is more difficult," the first poem in the book quotes Merleau-Ponty, "than to know precisely what we see." How is knowledge made manifest? How do our senses clarify our knowing? In what way do our senses distort this thing we call the real? What is the function of language, the medium of poetry, as we approach a gnosis beyond words-the mystical, say, or the sacred?The poems move through a variety of landscapes-retreating glaciers, the west of Ireland and the Aran Islands, the high desert of the American Southwest, Proven al hill towns, and the scrappy suburban woods of the metro D.C. area where the poet lives. Written in the age of climate change, Pankey's poems are keenly aware of the world he inhabits and, in inhabiting, damages-a paradise, like all the others, lost, and if not lost, soon to be.As in Pankey's previous work, the poems in Vanishments approach with care and precision, and with insight and speculation, questions of faith and doubt, the familiar and the arcane, and the quotidian and the spectral. The poet and translator, John Taylor, says of Pankey's poetry, "Marked by an intriguing dialectic of owning and debt, of fullness and absence, of receptiveness and inability, these intense, thoughtful poems trace an arduous spiritual 'pilgrimage' of the highest metaphysical order."

“I am stunned, delighted, and moved by the seamless merging of meaning and music that unfolds throughout The Future Perfect: A Fugue. Whether made up of one sentence or a dozen, each section of this long, single work stands on its own, as self-sufficient as a painting in a museum, while contributing to the whole masterful gathering. “This is an intricate work of decisive oscillation, of tender and careful attention shifting swiftly and precisely between the infinitesimal and the vast, and between one concrete reality and another, without ever losing its way: The house rages, but is not consumed. Ablaze, it stands as square and certain as a child’s drawing. In each window: flames instead of curtains. “Such sure-footed writing is astonishing. It would be an understatement to point out that the reader rarely encounters such piercing visionary states, with the author highly alert to sound and syllable, while focused on meaning: Is it disillusion or dissolution that one experiences first? “Throughout, the author probes our capacity for perception: what do we see (the present), remember (the past), and imagine (the future)? And how do we understand them? What elevates the writing even more is the unmistakable passion and urgency pulsing throughout each of the poem’s sections, the deliberate and inspired choice of every word.”

In Not Yet Transfigured, Eric Pankey extends his poetic oeuvre in ways simultaneously foreseeable and fresh. Seeing itself becomes a metaphysical activity in these poems, whether the object in view is the unmediated natural world or a work of art. The influence of poetic masters in the meditative mode such as Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, and Charles Wright is evident in Pankey's latest collection. Concluding with a major new prose poem, Landscape in Theory: A Meditation, Not Yet Transfiguredis an essential volume for every lover of contemporary poetry.

“Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it.” —DAN BEACHY-QUICK Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels through such places as Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest. Along the way, Pankey ponders mortality, religious narratives and iconography, the continued press of childhood on the present, and the simultaneous violence and beauty of the natural world. At the book’s core are three ambitious poems titled “The Complete List of Everything,” which together offer an extended vision of American longing and connection—as well as a window into the sort of compendium of images and moments a sustained devotion to poetry can yield. “The hope was to construct // A coherent totality of meaning from odds / And ends,” Pankey writes, and so much of this book is about the difficult work of constructing meaning from the available material all around us. This book is an extraordinary example of lyric-meditative journaling—a large and profound collection by a brilliant poet writing at the height of his powers.

From celebrated poet Eric Pankey, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary. The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird’s flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature’s smallest details: a lizard’s quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail’s shell. Here the sensory world and the imagined one collide in unexpected and wonderful ways, as Pankey scrutinizes the physical for meaning, and that meaning for truth. With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known—and the unknown—be captured in language? “If one cannot see clearly,” Pankey writes, borrowing from Freud, “one at least wants / what is unclear to be in focus.” Augury is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence, “a book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.”

"What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?" Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankey's ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghel's Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoor's Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio's series of severed heads, and James Turrell's experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible past, despite being firmly rooted in the present, to seek out "the songbird in every thorn thicket" of the artist's work. Short bursts of lyrical beauty burn away "like coils of incense ash," bodies in the light of a cave flicker, coalesce and disappear. By capturing the ephemeral beauty of life in these poems, Crow-Work seeks not only to explain great art, but also to embody it.

Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize Free Verse Editions, Edited by Jon Thompson "In these precise, dream-like poems, Eric Pankey peers through the clarifying lens of metaphor and parable to meditate on mystery, human sympathy and the divine. Here, the shifting image of fire both articulates and consumes our sense of the vastness of history and the ineffable nature of divinity. Elsewhere, a lemon, "transformed by one's attention to it, is a spark pent up in a barn, is long shadows on a glacier. The lemon waits to be recognized like the inscrutable event of a miracle." Or later, writing on complexities of compassion, Pankey describes a fox, terrified and snarling in a Havahart trap: 'I had to shake him out of the cage with more violence than I'd have preferred.' With DISMANTLING THE ANGEL, Eric Pankey shows once more why he is one of the American poets I admire most. These are such deeply moving, humane, and thoughtful poems." -KEVIN PRUFER "'This is important, thus I repeat myself, ' insists the speaker in the title poem of Eric Pankey's DISMANTLING THE ANGEL. And repeat himself he does. As he should, shuddering out such elusive and luminous sentences as 'The fire retains only its shape, its shifting, ambiguous, wind-shredded shape.' As he should, since his poems, more than anyone else's, take the shape of fire, all its ambiguity and wind-shreddedness, all its likeness to poppies in the wheat." -H. L. HIX ERIC PANKEY is the author of nine previous collections of poetry, including most recently THE PEAR AS ONE EXAMPLE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1984-2008 and TRACE. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Brown Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he teaches in the MFA and BFA programs in Creative Writing.

His arresting ninth collection of poems, Eric Pankey's Trace locates itself at a threshold between faith and doubt--between the visible and the invisible, the say-able and the ineffable, the physical and the metaphysical. Also a map of the poet's journey into a deep depression, these poems confront one man's struggle to overcome depression's smothering weight and presence. And with remarkable clarity and complexity, Trace charts the poet's attempt to be inspired, to breathe again, to give breath and life to words. Ever solemn, ever existential, Pankey's poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment when we as humans--believers and nonbelievers alike--must ultimately pause to question the uncertain fate of our souls.

Fans of an earlier generation of American poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, and Robert Bly, will find much to enjoy in this large volume of poetry that showcases an acute poetic prowess, capturing a range of heartfelt emotions and experiences. --NewPagesAllows readers to observe the nuances of style and thematic continuities within this atuhor's complex body of work... The poems within The Pear as One Example invoke barren landscapes and unremarkeable objects, rendering them a gem-like concentration of subjective concepts, which shine with 'arctic, oblique light' throughout. --Smartish PaceThis book off ers a generous selection from Eric Pankey's previous seven collections of poetry as well a book-length group of new poems.For Pankey, language is a means of divination, of augury, of reading the world--the refracted past, the ephemeral present, and the mutable future. While these meditative poems are deeply philosophical, their subject is the world of things. In these poems, he explores the world by way of the body--the body as a marker of time, the body as a vessel of grief, the body as an ecstatic radiant filament. Like an alchemist, Pankey takes the elemental and transmutes it into the mythic.At the center of many of these poems is a spiritual crisis. Pankey is like the man Flannery O'Connor describes in her essay, "Novelist and Believer," who "can neither believe nor contain himself in disbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God." Each of these poems is a pilgrimage.If Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the strange, arranged marriage that gave rise to American poetry, Pankey is their off spring: at once expansive and concise, clear and hermetic, and visionary and mystic.Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1959, Eric Pankey directed the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis for many years. For the last decade, he has taught in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he is professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his wife and daughter.

Originally drafted over a six-month period, the five-line sections of each poem in Reliquaries were written mostly as walking meditations in the hills and woods above and along the banks of the Occoquan River in Virginia. While that landscape is present in several places in the collection, the mind in these poems wanders arctic zones, England, Europe, the distances and openness of the American Midwest where the poet grew up, and takes up subjects such as the death of family and friends, faith and doubt, beauty and the sublime, philosophy and art. This book is Pankey's most expansive, accessible and wide-ranging to date. Written in long lines that, like Whitman's, catalog and collect, arrange out of the scattershot an order--even if only a momentary order, even if only a relic of order on which one places faith in a greater unifying order.Completed on a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship at the same time as 2003's Oracle Figures (Ausable Press), Reliquaries is a cousin and companion to that book. It is a book-length sequence of poems that combines the spiritual and sometimes hermetic quest of Pankey's short lyric poems of the 1990s (Apocrypha, The Late Romances and Cenotaph) with his more directly narrative, plain-spoken poems of the 1980s (For the New Year, Heartwood). Like a reliquary, each poem not only holds shards of memory, relics of the past, but each poem is a meditation upon the complexity of memory--its uncertainty and mutability, its precision and candor, its grave density and its ether-weight.Eric Pankey has received the Walt Whitman Award from The Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Award from the Library of Virginia and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A professor of English at George Mason University, he lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Pankey is known for his elegant lyrics and classical purity of phrasing. This is his sixth book (we wooed him away from Knopf), showing a poet in mid-career whose work is moving in the direction of greater openness and economy of expression. John Taylor in the Antioch Review called Pankey's work an arduous spiritual 'pilgrimage' of the highest metaphysical order.

This is Pankey's sixth book, showing a poet in mid-career who is known for his elegant lyrics and classical purity of phrasing. John Taylor in The Antioch Review called Pankey's work "an arduous spiritual 'pilgrimage' of the highest metaphysical order."