The Pear As One Example - Softcover

Pankey, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 193133739X ISBN 13: 9781931337397

Publisher: Ausable Press, 2008

Synopsis

"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." —NewPages

"Allows readers to observe the nuances of style and thematic continuities within this atuhor's complex body of work... The poems within The Pear as One Example invoke barren landscapes and unremarkeable objects, rendering them a gem-like concentration of subjective concepts, which shine with 'arctic, oblique light' throughout." —Smartish Pace

This book off ers a generous selection from Eric Pankey’s previous seven collections of poetry as well a book-length group of new poems.

For Pankey, language is a means of divination, of augury, of reading the world—the refracted past, the ephemeral present, and the mutable future. While these meditative poems are deeply philosophical, their subject is the world of things. In these poems, he explores the world by way of the body—the body as a marker of time, the body as a vessel of grief, the body as an ecstatic radiant filament. Like an alchemist, Pankey takes the elemental and transmutes it into the mythic.

At the center of many of these poems is a spiritual crisis. Pankey is like the man Flannery O’Connor describes in her essay, “Novelist and Believer,” who “can neither believe nor contain himself in disbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.” Each of these poems is a pilgrimage.

If Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the strange, arranged marriage that gave rise to American poetry, Pankey is their off spring: at once expansive and concise, clear and hermetic, and visionary and mystic.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1959, Eric Pankey directed the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis for many years. For the last decade, he has taught in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he is professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his wife and daughter.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Pankey was educated at the University of Missouri and the University of Iowa. His awards include the Academy of American Poet's Walt Whitman Award, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Fairfax, VA, and teaches at George Mason University.

Reviews

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: Soon enough the word// Incarnates as a burnished body.... The stop-gap stitches where the narrative frays. Many will continue to find such speculations profound. (May)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ausable Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 193133739X
• ISBN 13: 9781931337397
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112