Augury: Poems

by Eric Pankey

From celebrated poet Eric Pankey, 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, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known--and the unknown-- be captured in language?

Augury is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence, "a book of stones unstitched from the wolf's belly."

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published November 7, 2017

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

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eric Pankey is the Kansas City poet with a long-time residency in Fairfax, Virginia, who has been discussed in terms of the production model he has observed since his first book, For the New Year won the Walt Whitman Prize in 1984. Since then, Pankey has moved with his editor, Harry Ford, from Atheneum, where Pankey published the follow-up, Heartwood (1988), to Knopf, where Ford brought out a trilogy of books, Apocrypha (1991), The Late Romances (1997) and Cenotaph at more or less tw0-to-three year intervals. Upon Ford's death, there was a slight delay, but Pankey moved to Ausable (edited by Chase Twitchell), where three books appeared in the aughts, Oracle Figures (2003), Reliquaries (2005) and a New & Selected (2008), before Ausable folded, and -- again, after a slight delay -- Milkweed picked Pankey up, and in the odd years of the teens he has published again at two year-intervals, with an oddling book of prose-poems, brought out by Parlour Press, Dismantling the Angel in 2014. I think Pankey is one of the best poets to study along the lines Mark McGurl set out for theorizing contemporary American fictional production in The Program Era (2009), as Pankey's production, unlike many poets, has not been hampered by teaching (at George Mason), nor do his poems lose anything by reading them with the methods taught in those professionalizing institutions we call programs in creative writing.

Of course there are dissenters to this view, both of the program era, as well as of Pankey. Rarely do criticisms of Pankey bother to mount a critique of the reading methods and craft models the MFA produces. One is tempted to infer that the training is difficult to gainsay. The poems would be another matter. Just so, Pankey is a poet's poet. I have tried elsewhere, to explain why I think this is so. For now, I'll just describe. In Augury, two sequences vie to hold the book together; in one, "Speculations," Pankey moves to a shorter line than he typically uses; while in the other, "Souvenir de Voyage," he adopts a Char-like prose paragraph. I find the short-lined poems difficult at times to hold onto: "A gray stray light | Dims this moment | And the next," goes one stanza. Part of the purpose, it is evident, is to see how little one needs to do: "Horses gather, graze in high pasture," goes a more spirited opening line. It continues: "On the rain-rich side of the range, | Rain. | Here, cloud-broken sun. | At a loss for words, I write poems. | The rocks hold heat into the evenings." This, I think, is lovely ("High Pasture," it's called) for its seeing its own solitariness as an expression of climate, weather. It's the pastoralism of that other Kansas Cityan, James Tate, and Tate's Stevens-gob-smacked teacher, Donald Justice, that are tutelary in these pastoral poems. (Tate's production model is an early template for Pankey's.) The book seems to explore the other heights to which the high pasture leads.

[Theremin Poisoning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasantly surprised surprised by this one. Embedded deep in the skillfully crafted poetry are occasional biblical references that are like discovering the baby in the King Cake. I'll be reading more from this poet.