Bøger af Eric Pankey

"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."

"Eric Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it." -DAN BEACHY-QUICK

What is a song but a snare to capture the moment? Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankeys ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghels Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoors Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggios series of severed heads, and James Turrells experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible past, despite being firmly rooted in the present, to seek out "e;the songbird in every thorn thicket"e; 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.

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

"If only words were salt-soluble, savory, vital, electric," Eric Pankey writes in "Variations on Hadrian's Animula," one of many virtuosic works in Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 - 2018. In this diverse collection of lyrical prose, Pankey assays his personal-poetic history with passion, brilliance, and grace. He considers the works of many great poets-Dickinson, Stevens, Donne, Hopkins, Merwin, Justice, Levis, and Lorca, to name just a few-invoking them as teachers and guides. As much about language as the unutterable, sight as the unseen, Vestiges is a gorgeous, vital collection. -Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of The RiotsVestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 - 2018 maps the mind of one of our best lyrical poets and thinkers. In these concise and nuanced works of prose, Eric Pankey meditates on such subjects as spiritual faith, the poetic image, memory, language, duende, and silence in poetry. Pankey is a quester, a searcher for truth, so it's no surprise that in Vestiges he eschews nailed-down arguments and grand arrivals, prioritizing the question and the journey towards "the unsayable, the untouchable . . . the unknowable." He reminds us that mystery and uncertainty are not weaknesses, but essential aspects of a life lived richly in both art and faith. -Brian Barker, author of Vanishing ActsEric Pankey muses, "What is the divine? How is it made manifest? Where does it reside?" Revisiting the lyric impulse in a post-religious generation, Vestiges ponders the Romantic lyric subject in light of postmodern skepticism with allusions to Biblical contexts, illuminating the phenomenon of wonder in a material yet epistemologically unstable world: "In the lyric, language is both the ritual and the sacrifice at the moment's altar." Guided by an inner compass of memory and desire, psalms and lamentations, restoration and revival, we unearth in ourselves "not a spark, but a splinter of God in each of us, inflamed, working its way to the surface." This book, a revitalizing act of faith and inspiration, is a marvelous gift to us. -Karen An-hwei Lee, author of Phyla of JoyERIC PANKEY is also the author of ten collections of poetry and Professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.