About the Book
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.
About the Author :
Eric Pankey is the author of eight previous collections of poetry, most recently The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008 and Reliquaries. He is the recipient of a Walt Whitman Award, a Library of Virginia Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Field, Gettysburg Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as numerous anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2011 (edited by Kevin Young). He is currently Professor of English and Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
Review :
Advance Praise for Trace "The poems in Eric Pankey's Trace come together to create a landscape both melancholy and utterly beautiful, balancing a careful awareness of the 'once and the to be, / the frost-gnawed grain.' Tracing the spiritual as he senses it move through the natural world, he reminds us again and again that to 'occupy a space is to shape it,' and the shaping of experience becomes finally the shaping of the page in language brilliantly wrought. Trace is Eric Pankey at his finest." --Claudia Emerson "In this age of both religious extremism and cynical atheism, Eric Pankey's poems gleam with authenticity. From his earliest work, his abiding interest has been in probing the place where human consciousness confronts what lies outside of our understanding. The poems are prayers sent into the unknown, for 'one must penetrate the invisible to reside in the visible.' One of their great pleasures is the door through which Pankey enters the mysteries: the natural world, with which he has profound intimacy. In language that is always elegant, complex, and rigorously truthful, he transfixes us with glimpses of what we can never fully know. Trace is a brilliant furthering of this mission." --Chase Twichell "Imbued with stark lyricism, Eric Pankey's new poems are marvelous palimpsests on the struggles of faith." --Arthur Sze "Eric Pankey's poetic and spiritual turf has ever been the borderland between paradise and exile, that liminal territory which belongs both to sumptuous, symbiotic rapture and to the banished realm that makes language essential. The poems in Trace read like post-Lapsarian 'translations' of metaphysical truths about the 'dividual' in the individual self and our primal need for sacrifice and ritual in the face of that truth. Beauty-struck, dark with yearning, melancholy, and unlooked-for, salvific joy, these new poems extend Pankey's already capacious and original vision of the God-hungry, remnant self, and thus the lyric poem itself, in inimitably haunted and haunting ways." --Lisa Russ Spaar Praise for The Pear as One Example: New & Selected Poems 1984-2008 "Pankey is one of the quiet poets, given to the graces of beautiful, rendered writing burdened by the consciousness that words are never enough. Thus Pankey is one of the honest poets." --Stanley Plumly "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." --New Pages "Eric Pankey is a poet of precise observation and startling particularities. His wisdom, sometimes idelong, sometimes direct, both knows and feels. These poems possess a sense of a self not the least self-regarding; they unbridle us into a freshened and metamorphic wordscape. The soundcraft is superb, the modes of investigation by turns lyrical, surreal, meditative, allegorical, directspeaking, and allusive. An activating vision unfurls swifts from a chimney, makes of water, slightly darkened in its glass, 'heirloom silver left to tarnish.' Such almost alchemical images are multiple and dazzling, yet this book turns them on a single, central axis. Each of these poems notates time and time's effects; their inner griefs and their outer fidelities pull equally toward a meditation on incarnation. What matters here, this book seems to say, is what is knowable within matter. Yet it also tells us that what we can know of matter is what can be called forth by words: by the warming acts of amplifying consciousness that transform object into memento, locale into home-ground, each artifact into its right and full aliveness--amid, but not displaced by, human meaning." --Jane Hirshfield "Serious, even solemn, in his meditations on appearance and reality, dejection, consolation, selfhood and grief, Pankey's seven earlier books won the sustained respect of sophisticated readers. This first retrospective volume shows both the consistency of his self-scrutinizing tone and the ways in which, for him, a change of line and form changed everything. His free verse adagios of the 1980s emphasized personal epiphanies; Apocrypha (1991) brought the rhythms and the diction of Wallace Stevens to Pankey's engagement with Christian belief. More recent works such as Reliquaries (2005) pursued the details of the visible world and the vicissitudes of meditation in longer lines reminiscent of Charles Wright: 'I say a prayer for the world,' Pankey intones, 'and in the midst lose my place / Amid the winter garden, the rain garden, / the minor chord / Of seasons.' There and in 25 new poems--among them elegies, seasonal odes and associative self-portraits--Pankey works hard to bring together his abstract intensities with his desire to live in the here and now." --Publishers Weekly Praise for Eric Pankey "Like the work of an aerialist (the single figure poised above the crowd) Pankey's poetry seems to issue from the possibilities of heroic isolation... With each new volume I have held my breath to see him not falter in his pursuit of the beautiful." --Lynn Emanuel "An elegant opera of the human condition. The tempest is ubiquitous, continual--shreds of it appear in poem after poem as rain, shadows, haze, and fog. As with Shakespeare, it participates in the emotional weather of the human community." --Pamela Alexander, Boston Book Review "The clarity, intellectual heft, structure, poise, formal dexterity, and music... Pankey has become a poet of formidable skill and achievement." --Brian Henry, Verse "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." --John Taylor, Antioch Review "Pankey's attention to music and the line makes every poem a lesson and a joy." --Review Revue "Pankey's voice is elegant, his language as lovely as the images it carries." --Field "Pankey's poems, whether lyric or prose, are touching, sincere, and sublime and work well as a whole." --Library Journal "An elegiac poet with a sense of continuity ... [Pankey] treats subjects from the Creation to the Last Judgment with a felicity and loveliness so desolate that occasionally he fells compelled to provoke rather than suspend our disbelief." --Floyd Collins, The Gettysburg Review "Bone-spare, rhythmically rigorous, and quietly intense..." -- Arthur Sze
