Eric Pankey

Known for his formally inventive and elegant lyrics, Pankey explores new territory in Oracle Figures, his sixth book. In language that’s deeply satisfying for its precision unpredictable imagination, he takes us on an adventure of mind, asking and answering important questions about human consciousness and the art of making poems.

Oracle Figures

Originally drafted over a six-month period, the five-line sections of each poem in Reliquaries were written as walking meditations in the hills and woods above and along the banks of the Occoquan River in Virginia. The mind in these poems wanders beyond Virginia to arctic zones, the distances and openness of the American Midwest where the poet grew up, and overseas to Europe, and takes up subjects including 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. Reliquaries is written in long lines that, like Whitman’s, catalog and collect, arrange out of the scattershot an order—even if only a momentary order.

Reliquaries

Poems

Heartwood

From the award-winning poet behind Owl of Minerva, a collection of poems exploring themes of faith, memory, and meaning. 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. “Pankey’s language is beautiful and spare and he constantly surprises with profound lines. Pankey’s built a name for himself, and considering the quality of the poems in this collection, it’s no surprise.”—C. L. Bledsoe, Coal Hill Review “Pankey’s ninth collection follows the poet into the hushed “gray dawn” of depression as he searches, often in vain, for God, and for faith in nature and himself…. It’s hard to deny the conflict that Pankey explores honestly and powerfully in these new poems.”—Publishers Weekly

Trace

Alias is Eric Pankey’s second collection of prose poems from Free Verse Editions. The first, Dismantling the Angel, won the New Measure Poetry Prize. Pankey continues to investigate the flexibility and possibility of this literary genre, the prose poem, which Hermaine Riffaterre says has “an oxymoron for a name.” H. L. Hix has praised Pankey’s prose poems for their “elusive and luminous sentences” and how they “take the shape of fire.” Kevin Prufer has celebrated their meditations “on mystery, human sympathy, and the divine.” Cynthia Marie Hoffman says of these new poems, “One has the sense that Pankey sees beyond the visible, or sees both the visible and the invisible at once.”

Alias

A Walt Whitman Award–winning poet seeks the spiritual within everyday physical objects in this luminous collection. 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, Eric 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. “Pankey remains one of our leading practitioners of the metaphysical poem.” —C. Dale Young, author of Prometeo

Owl of Minerva

From award-winning poet and author of Crow-Work, 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? Augury is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence, “a book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.” Praise for Augury “A darkly luminous book by a poet at the height of his considerable poetic power.” —Kathy Fagan, author of Moving & St. Rage “This is a book I will keep close at hand, alongside the best work of Montale, Dickinson, Celan, and Stevens. This is a book one will turn to again and again.” —Rebecca Dunham, author of Cold Pastoral “Each ethereal image he weaves into his work is delicately curated, whittled down through his attention to sound. . . . Pankey’s poems destabilize as they straddle time and place, and he looks askance at the narrow way in which language is often viewed.” —Publishers Weekly

Augury

In Not Yet Transfigured, Eric Pankey extends his poetic oeuvre in ways simultaneously foreseeable and fresh. This is an essential volume for every lover of contemporary poetry.

Not Yet Transfigured

Marie Howe

Kansas City Art Institute

The Artist, the Poet : to Speak with a Vision, to See with a Lilt

Lilt

From the award-winning author of Augury, a poetry collection that examines the power of great works of art. “What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?” This central question drives Crow-Work, Eric Pankey’s ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Bruegel’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. Praise for Crow-Work “Eric Pankey’s sensibility is an unerringly generous one: he is always willing to step first onto unsteady ground, to test it for those who might follow. The poems of Crow-Work, like good gleaners, seek out possibility and sustenance. They are skilled, deft, and dazzlingly alert. Just when I think they have brought me as close as possible to the dark and unknowable things that make awe possible, they bring me closer. The journey is unnerving, intimate, and thrilling.” —Mary Szybist “The delicacy and accuracy we have come to expect from Eric Pankey are here on display and as deftly deployed as ever. Pankey remains one of our leading practitioners of the metaphysical poem.” —C. Dale Young “[A] wonderful exploration of the emotional power of art.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review, PW Picks)

Eric Pankey

Books

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