Crow-Work: Poems

by Eric Pankey

“What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?” Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankey’s ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghel’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 beauty burn away “like coils of incense ash,” bodies in the light of a cave flicker, coalesce and disappear. By capturing the ephemeral beauty of life in these poems, Crow-Work seeks not only to explain great art, but also to embody it.

Genres: Poetry

71 pages, Paperback

First published February 10, 2015

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

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pankey is a poet whose can pair the implied silence with the humble musicality of his work, lush evocation of the natural world with the alienation of abstraction, concise imagines with hazy memories. These are not new themes or tactic's in Pankey's work, but they are on particular display here.

Pankey's lyric narrator is effusive, and his ambivalent is seen immediately. Opening with the poem, "Ash," the elliptical nature of the collection is given in the first few lines: At the threshold of the dive, how to know/but indirectly," and we know immediately that what is not said in Pankey is as important as what is said. Interestly, Pankey's lyrics are spiritual and fugue-like, with the ponderous yet disciplined musing that can remind one of Geoffrey Hill.

Pankey is not as unforgiving as Hill or post-modernist, as he does allow his musings to give the reader directions on how to read him: “the present leaks into the past, tinctures it./ A poem is not a séance and yet how quickly the shades crowd in/ Expecting elegy and lamentation.” The allusions are heavy: Buddha, Zhang Huan., Desert Fathers, and Giorgio Morandi. Yet allusions aid the allusiveness of the poetry and mirror the style.

This is most pronounced in the longer poem, Fragments, where Pankey really shines on his fugues on memories. Indeed, this is Crow-Work, cawing at you as both something you recognize and something alien: wild and intelligent, symbolically on at the gate of death and still in the world of the living.

A very strong collection.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pankey has always worked within the literary precincts of poem-lore, for as he says, "there is no cause, only correspondence," whence "in the realm of the poem only words are native," yet I sense in Crow-Work the beagle's nose for the world's information: in a Spanish cave, its shadowy images a present to amaze us, "we mean that which cannot extricate itself from the gaze," even where the visible's remnant is no more than spectral, and where one is involved in it, "one imagines past grandeur" as a poem-lore such that one "doubt[s] a correspondence | Between the animal and the spiritual." Just so, however, Pankey falls in love with that glimpse of a self the past offers spectrally. The volume finds a gnostic divinity ekphrastically working after Anish Kapoor's disc-ed chapel spaces, wherein Kapoor's slits, crow-like apertures in otherwise ordinary walls, are "An empty space disrupted by time -- | Embodies the caesura | Between gaze and gazed upon, | Threshold and entry. " About his own incredulities, Pankey concludes, "One does not possess a wilderness, | One enters it," which opens this gazer up to all sorts of function in what he's looking at. Crow enters the fray. I found it very creaturely, indeed, to be stamping around the couplets in the volume's last two, long sequences, wondering what they were called, remembering to go look it up.

[John Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pankey's poems could be compared to spells found in the diary of an empathetic hermit. He is following his own psychic thread, refining it and reconciling it with the language of his readers.

In this collection he explores the aesthetic process itself, the alchemical union of inspiration and Apollonian creation.

STUDY FOR SALOME DANCING BEFORE HEROD

"In the movement toward disappearance,
She is pulled by an undertow of ecstasy.
She wakes in a room where she never fell asleep.
A thousand starlings leaf out a bare tree.
She wakes in a dusky, tenebrous zone.
Evening on the ridges and in the mountains,
But light still spills on the valley floor.

What transport brought her here?
The shape of gravity embodies apron the table.
Here times the only sovereign.
She is like an arrow slipped from its quiver."

He gets better and better, though I'm puzzled as to why he is continually referred to as a "metaphysical" poet.

Recommended for all lovers of poetry.

[Emily Shearer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This man is a sage, a spirit-watcher, a word-conjurer, a sit-back-and-observer-then-spin-it-into-poetry-maker. He's also a fine professor and an all-around nice guy. These poems verge on breath-taking with their deft yet economical use of the most beautiful words to describe the most ineffable, the indescribable, the ash to wind, the way we change the space around us and cannot not be of the change.

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

That stalled moment in the trajectory
When an object neither rises nor falls
Is like seeing in your face the child you were:
Wholly you,
yet calm, unmarked by betrayals.
-- "Spirit Figures"

To see the past we seclude ourselves in cave-depth.
To see the past we descend.
Are those two horses?
Or is that a horse outflanked by its shadow?
-- "Working in the Dark"

Buried, one feels the self, and not the stars, move.
-- "Fragments from an Excavation"

(the miracle: that I am a body, not a ghost;
That I make embodied words, not ghost-sounds).
-- "Fragment"

I'll enter the afterlife empty-handed,
Without grave good or tomb furnishings,
Pockets turned inside out.
I'll wait for you
Where wisteria overhangs the bank.
You'll recognize my shadow
by its patches, its frayed cuffs.
-- "If We Never Meet Again This Side of Heaven"

[chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF 36%
didn't like: 36% in and I didn't enjoy any of the poems. nothing touched me, up to that point, emotionally which is the BIG reason why I read at all, but certainly more so with poetry.
let's talk price point. I paid $14.61 (US) for the printed copy when I bought it several years ago. It's current price on Amazon is $16 (US). The book is 96 pages, or roughly $0.16 a page (at $16 a book)? which cost wise is atrocious. I can buy printed poetry collections for the same base price but that have hundreds of pages worth of poems.
liked: poems have titles, table of contents, page numbers (funny thing about poetry books, not all contain such things).

[Isak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pankey at his purest and least ornate. Allusive, illusive, elusive, but not unfriendly. He finds a way to tell you what he wants to tell you.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

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