Cenotaph

by Eric Pankey

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.

"The cenotaph is the perfect figure for these 'elegiac variations' by Eric Pankey -- variations of elegance, even stateliness, that stand for qualities of craft and metaphysical insight that have become the poet's standard. Pankey is one of the quiet poets, given to the graces of beautiful, rendered writing burdened by the consciousness that words are never enough. Thus Pankey is one of the honest poets." --Stanley Plumly

104 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2000

About the author

Eric Pankey is the author of eight previous collections of poetry, most recently The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008 and Reliquaries. He is the recipient of a Walt Whitman Award, a Library of Virginia Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Field, Gettysburg Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as numerous anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2011 (edited by Kevin Young). He is currently Professor of English and Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.