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In Not Yet Transfigured, Eric Pankey extends his poetic oeuvre in ways simultaneously foreseeable and fresh. This is an essential volume for every lover of contemporary poetry.
The seventh book by a poet with an established following.
A Walt Whitman Award–winning poet seeks the spiritual within everyday physical objects in this luminous collection. Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns 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, Eric 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 L...
From the award-winning author of Augury, a poetry collection that examines the power of great works of art. “What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?” This central question drives Crow-Work, Eric Pankey’s ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoor’s Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio’s series of severed heads, and James Turrell’s experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible past, despite being firmly rooted in the present, to seek out “the songbird in every thorn thicket” of the artist’s work. Short bursts of lyrical b...
Reminiscent of More's Utopia and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Denis Veiras's History of the Sevarambians is one of the great utopian novels of the seventeenth century. Set in Australia, this rollicking adventure story comes complete with a shipwreck, romantic tales, religious fraud, magical talismans, and supernatural animals. The current volume contains two versions of Veiras's story: the original English and the 1738 English translation of the expanded French version. Veiras's work was well known in its own time and has been translated into a number of languages, including German, French, Russian, and Japanese, while the English version has been largely forgotten. The book has been read to teach a variety of political doctrines, and also has been cited as an early development in the history of ideas about religious toleration. It reveals a great deal about early modern English, Dutch, and French attitudes toward other cultures. One of the first utopian writings to qualify as a novel, it can be interpreted as a metaphor for human life, in all its complexity and ambiguity.
“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 Riots Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Es...
Cenotaph is the third panel in a triptych of books that began with Apocrypha and continued with The Late Romances. All contain poems "stained with grief," as Pamela Alexander described Pankey's work in the "Boston Book Review -- grief for the passing of the poet's parents, of his teachers and friends, and of his own once-held belief. Pankey's poetry vibrates with a deep and delicate musicality. The natural world that sustains and buries us here becomes refracted into an intricate web of glinting, harrowing light, into words circumscribing absence. Jeff Hamilton said in "Delmar that Pankey's eschatological poems are written from the "vantage of the lapsed sublime." In these extraordinary poems of spiritual crisis, gravity and grace, sacred and profane love, the mythic and the heirloom, are all confronted at the open threshold of an empty tomb -- the cenotaph -- where doubt, not faith, awaits.
Jill Osier's poems of quiet attention comprise this 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets The hollow more than shape is certain. The 114th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets features Jill Osier's poems of quiet attention to the human and natural worlds. Series judge and critically acclaimed poet Carl Phillips notes, "Osier's is a sensibility unlike any I've encountered before--the poems here are thrilling, and strangely new." In his foreword to the collection, Phillips writes, "Certain mysteries--most of them--remain mysteries in an Osier poem." Despite this, Osier's poetry--distinguished by its brevity, precision, and restraint--offers what Phillips describes as feeling "incongruously (dare I say magically?) like closure, a steady place to land."
From award-winning poet and author of Crow-Work, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary. The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird’s flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature’s smallest details: a lizard’s quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail’s shell. Here the sensory world and the imagined one collide in unexpected and wonderful ways, as Pankey scrutinizes the physical for meaning, and that meaning for truth. With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery...
"Featuring line-drawings by Stackhouse & poems-as-essays by Keene--handed back and forth and back again, written and rewritten, drawn and redrawn--Seismosis penetrates the common ground between writing/literature and drawing/visual art, creating a revisioned landscape where much of the work is abstract, or abstracted, or both. The multiform agreements the texts & the drawings make, from a brilliant & decisive center, are revolutionary, antilinear, and highly responsive. The result is a sophisticated call-and-response affair. A pioneering event between two African-American artists, Seismosis is a formal experience. How drawing ultimately is coming into forms, how looking (for) recreates deforms."--Publisher's website.