In
his eighteenth collection of poetry, Eric Pankey continues his
forty-year investigation into how and what one can know in this world and
beyond it. The poet, Jane Hirshfield, says about his poetry, "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."
Perception and the phenomenology of
perception are central to the concerns of these beautifully austere poems.
"Nothing is more difficult," the first poem in the book quotes Merleau-Ponty,
"than to know precisely what we see." How is knowledge made manifest?
How do our senses clarify our knowing? In what way do our senses distort this
thing we call the real? What is the function of language, the medium of
poetry, as we approach a gnosis beyond words-the mystical, say, or the sacred?
The poems move through a variety of
landscapes-retreating glaciers, the west of Ireland and the Aran Islands, the
high desert of the American Southwest, Provençal hill towns, and the scrappy
suburban woods of the metro D.C. area where the poet lives. Written in the age
of climate change, Pankey's poems are keenly aware of the world he inhabits
and, in inhabiting, damages-a paradise, like all the others, lost, and if not
lost, soon to be.
As in Pankey's previous work, the
poems in Vanishments approach with care and precision, and with insight
and speculation, questions of faith and doubt, the familiar and the arcane, and
the quotidian and the spectral. The poet and translator, John Taylor, says of
Pankey's poetry, "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."
