For the New Year

by Eric Pankey

DJ is a little edge worn, else a very good copy.

Genres: Poetry

65 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

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.

Reviews

[Mary Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

22/31 #TheSealeyChallenge

[Jessica Freeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always have the sense when reading Eric Pankey that I’m reading some version of love and devotion to the world and to the human condition. Even when he’s writing about loss or death, or the disparities of life, we still see so much beauty. There is always a tender love and devotion to experience. I suppose all that really says about him and his poetry, is that he’s a poet with a capitol P. Because, after all that is what I think poetry is supposed to do, to touch on the intimacies of our existence, without being overwrought, so that the reader can feel a little less alone in this world, in their body, and in thought. I love the poem “Reading in Bed” and think this is a fine example of what I just listed above as his incredible talents. He is adept at taking a moment and an image, and using that as a spring board or philosophical leap into what connects us all, and I think this book is an exceptional model of how to do this. The poems “Smoke,” “Winter Anniversary,” and “Reasons of Ice” stand out to me as poems where he’s really narrowed in on existence and used the outer world to speak of his complicated existence. He meditates for a long time in those poems on the images around him, so much of it without heightened conflict that I think much of them must be allegorical. I hate to limit the poems by reading them that way though and am thinking about how they can do both. Maybe for some readers sometimes its an allegory and for others, a meditation of the world. When a poem provides these multiple avenues, that’s when I think the poem has reached some sort of transcended place and liminality. And that must be the goal, to write a poem that transcends and gets us into conversation with the universality of life and all that truly transcends place and earthly beauty. I think Pankey achieves this a lot in his earlier poems, and there is so much to admire in these too.