About the Book
"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 Minervaturns 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.
About the Author :
Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Augury. He is the recipient of a Walt Whitman Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Library of Virginia Literary Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Field, Gettysburg Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2011 (edited by Kevin Young). He is currently a professor of English and Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
Review :
Praise for Augury "These pages are marked by the startling confidence of one who knows he does not know, who 'at a loss for words, ' responds by writing poems. There is no more audacious act; there is no work more humble. Eric Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it--where we can learn from what resists understanding, where even withholding reveals, where the future includes all the past, and though the mind might be obliterated by the light it seeks, it seeks it still, in the ruins and in the orchard."--Dan Beachy-Quick
"Reading Augury, I feel as if Eric Pankey were drawing my attention to an experience of human history in such profoundly reverse sensory order that it is ultimately turned entirely soul-ward--by which I mean neither inward nor outward exactly, but toward the condition in which all assumptions can and should be questioned. Gods, ghosts, artists, ruins and the more vivid pleasures of civilization abound, as do the sublime horrors and ecstatic wonders not merely of divination, but of our daily lives: the very mortal acts of breathing, learning, sensing, and feeling. 'By shadow, I mean something luminescent, ' Pankey writes. Augury is nothing less than a darkly luminous book by a poet at the height of his considerable poetic power, both an achievement and a book to return to again and again."--Kathy Fagan
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
"Eric Pankey is engaged in a meaningful struggle with the elements of the lyric. Faithful to his sensory experience of the world, he affirms an extrasensory totality. Pankey is a powerful poet, and not only because of his engagement: his best poems speak for themselves."--Michael Autrey
"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
Praise for Trace
"Eric 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
"Eric Pankey's poems gleam with authenticity. They 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."--Chase Twichell
