Books

Praise for Eric Pankey’s recent books:

 

“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

 

This is the best kind of memoir: Eric Pankey remembers not events but dreams, mysteries. "I have lived here longer than I have lived anywhere but it does not yet feel like home. I forgot" he says of his home. And what did he forget? On that moment of being at home but not quite there, what is discovered? "The slow art of forgetting occupies what passes here for time," the poet says. 

       This is a book of visions wherein mystery attempts to be clear.

        How?

        Clarity, clarity is our deepest mystery Mahmoud Darwish once told us.

        As I turn the pages of Eric Pankey's very, very beautiful new prose poetry collection, which I think is a memoir in verse, yes. But not the kind where biographical story is told. This is the story of soul's glimpses that other people might call prose poems. He is in time, but not quite of it. Poet's mother and Eurydice are both here. Invisible man, and a host of other characters show up. But don't be fooled, reader, this is the story of time. "At midnight, time thins like wisps of clouds over mountains," Pankey tells us. "The past nags like a bone spur," he insists. "While I was away, the future arrived."

 

Enter the rooms of these prose poems, reader, and sit down. Listen to (and remember) the silence. For it is marvelous. And, why not, why not? Imagination, after all, is just some remembering. From the other side, of course.

--Ilya Kaminsky

 

“The question,” Eric Pankey avows in his serial title poem, “is always of time.” An “archive of indecisions,” The History of the Siege is a beguiling book of inventories and elegies, of fugue and fever dream, of uncanny conundrums and para-fairy tales, in which doors open onto doors leading up to “a balcony that steps off into fog.” Each prose poem is a Pandora’s box whose contents exceed the frame, as we freefall through detours of improv and control. A mix of wild, associative capaciousness with forensic exactitude, these “firings” are actually fueled—not foiled—by distorted signals and radio delay, interference, odd code, feedback loops and loopholes, “glitchy disharmony.” By Pankey’s hypnagogic logic, any experience that’s out of sync, from pandemic panic to déjà vu, is the proper sign of our times. And what time is it anyway, what tense are we even in, when “the boat’s wake arrives before the boat”—? 

—Andrew Zawacki 

 

"The History of the Siege" navigates intimate topographies of memory, grief, shame, and yearning. A lucid voyage of clarity, depth, and ineffable wonder, Pankey's poems assert their humanity, courage, and faith in a difficult world. His language treads ambivalent territories where spirituality and mortality intersect. There, a vast mind lives. Such meditations gather into a profound frieze of life itself, sweeping across the precision of childhood to the stinging battlefield of Covid 19. Of history and the self, Pankey notes, "Ghosts are driven from the house, but they are not what haunted it." Like water, fire, air, memory and earth, these prose poems gather elementally into a revelatory force. 

 ––Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

Eric Pankey's The History of the Siege is prose poetry deeply faithful to the European roots of the genre, resurrected from the ennui of pandemic and the horror of a recent tyranny, where, as he writes, "the slow art of forgetting occupies what passes here for time." Some pieces recall the landscape of Rimbaud's Season in Hell, where the father is cast as fire breather and the mother the artist whose cigarettes set the house on fire; others are reminiscent of Max Jacob's dreams, or his "The Cock and the Pearl" from Jacob's seminal volume, The Dice Cup. In Pankey's achievement those Jacobian reveries are, to my eye, the most marvelous reinventions of the form, masterfully translated within a twenty-first century vocabulary. In "Recently Recovered Pages from The Complete List of Everything" and in the title poem (a kind of book that closes the book), the intelligence, language, and imagery are nothing short of breathtaking: "Like Odysseus, one wears the dirt and rags of abdication...One arrives at an archipelago adorned in distances." The History of the Siege not only holds but advances Eric Pankey's reputation as one of the best poets writing in English today. This work is spectacular. 

--David Keplinger 

​

“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."

—Jane Hirshfield

 

“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  

 

“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

 

"Eric Pankey’s poems in Augury manage the almost impossible task of invoking the stillness that exists within movement. This renders the poems marvelously meditative, no matter their topical content, because everything in them is brought to exist in a kind of space between perception and what is perceived, a space made somehow sacred by Pankey’s refusal to privilege one over the other, allowing both to simply be. The result is an unusually quiet and masterful work."

--Christopher Howell

 

"In the ancient world there were manuals of prophecies to help interpret the mystifying words of the Oracle; embedded in the poems almost all knew, hid the codes to interpret the intentions of the gods—flight of hawk and eagle, appearance of snake, color of liver and tangles of intestine all spoke of what would happen, all sung to teach us what we do not know. Eric Pankey’s Augury knows those manuals have been lost, knows those rites of prophecy no longer work, not in the same way—he knows just as deeply that the desperate want for the world to speak its secrets still defines our condition. We have still this expectation of light to come, and in that light, a kind of revelation in which the old desire might be fulfilled: the want to read the world. “The purpose of a well-made tool is that it eases and lightens the work,” he writes, and the poet’s tool is the poem. 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. 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 seek it seeks it still, in the ruins and in the orchard."

--Dan Beachy-Quick

 

"Pankey remains one of our leading practitioners of the metaphysical poem."

--C. Dale Young

 

"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

 

 

"The clarity, intellectual heft, structure, poise, formal dexterity, and music. . . Pankey has become a poet of formidable skill and achievement."

—Brian Henry

 

"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