Reliquaries

by Eric Pankey

Originally drafted over a six-month period, the five-line sections of each poem in Reliquaries were written mostly as walking meditations in the hills and woods above and along the banks of the Occoquan River in Virginia. While that landscape is present in several places in the collection, the mind in these poems wanders arctic zones, England, Europe, the distances and openness of the American Midwest where the poet grew up, and takes up subjects such as the death of family and friends, faith and doubt, beauty and the sublime, philosophy and art. This book is Pankey’s most expansive, accessible and wide-ranging to date. Written in long lines that, like Whitman’s, catalog and collect, arrange out of the scattershot an order—even if only a momentary order, even if only a relic of order on which one places faith in a greater unifying order. Completed on a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship at the same time as 2003’s Oracle Figures (Ausable Press), Reliquaries is a cousin and companion to that book. It is a book-length sequence of poems that combines the spiritual and sometimes hermetic quest of Pankey’s short lyric poems of the 1990s ( Apocrypha , The Late Romances and Cenotaph ) with his more directly narrative, plain-spoken poems of the 1980s ( For the New Year , Heartwood ). Like a reliquary, each poem not only holds shards of memory, relics of the past, but each poem is a meditation upon the complexity of memory—its uncertainty and mutability, its precision and candor, its grave density and its ether-weight. Eric Pankey has received the Walt Whitman Award from The Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Award from the Library of Virginia and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A professor of English at George Mason University, he lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

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

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duhh

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eric's The Late Romances was a bit too stiff for my tastes, but this a beautiful, generous book. He lets his line loose and widens the disjunctions in his thoughts. This disjunction is further enforced by the division into each poem into four subsections. The stanzas are full but usually not overwhelming or so loosely structured that the mind goes one too many directions and ends up with nothing at all. They move sometimes effortlessly from extremely ornate nature scenes to meditations on the nature of language and memory--acts of magical recovery through language and admissions of the limitations of these acts. And, fortunately, these poems USUALLY push forward and keep us from lingering on lines that in a different context would be, well, a bit too cute: "How does one give in without giving up when one has mastered the conventions of closure?" Man, he gets away with this. Completely.

This is also a BIG book. Over one hundred pages. I'm happy it is. Just as the stands of each individual poem seem to want to wash over stanzaic barriers, thematic strands are allowed to drift throughout the different chapters, over the course of thirty, forty pages. This prevents us from reading it too narrowly--too autobiographically, too devotionally (?), etc.

Even the most straightforward of passages turns away from us at the end. Half of "Blind Willie Johnson Sings":

Sometimes I would stop off at the tool and die shop, or the glassworks, or the fireworks warehouse
To see if anyone wanted to go out for a beer or sometimes we'd just grab a twelve-pack and sit
On the tracks above the Missouri, talking and not talking as the worn day gave way to the night's blunt edge.
Home from college. Summer work. Not at home in these jobs. Not in the houses where we grew up.
Everything had stayed the same in our absence. No difference. Yet each of us now a debtor, a trespasser.

*

O Exhausted Spirit, Brooding Father, Distant Mother, take me to the river and I will cross it.
Take me to where the river is wide and deep and I will cross over.
You can hide from your elders but you can't from God, Blind Willie Johnson sings,
Can't nobody hide from God. (Year after year I wait to be found, to be found out). Can't nobody hide.
Can't nobody hide, can't nobody hide, can't nobody hide, can't nobody hide from God.

The speaker seeks others just as the reader seeks him. His failure to connect is underscored by our own failure "to find out" Pankey through the poems as biographical detail is subsumed by the insistence of an entirely other voice--"can't nobody hide from God."

Hey peoples--is Eric under-read? How do his other books compare?

[Zelda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book amazed me with it's ambition and execution. I loved the wind that swept through it, of death or immortality or mortality's reminder. Each poem as a reliquary. The enclosure of the form and it's porousness (4 parts, 5 lines each). I was surprised that it could be pulled off, so many of these poems in a row, many of them plumbing the same landscape, but continuing to offer new ways in. Pankey writes: "In a dream, the maze/drawn with a stick in the sand,/Circumscribes and encloses a token of the sacred and although I/made the maze myself, Full of false passages and dead ends, I cannot find my way to the/center." -- but his poems, or many of them, bring me there.

[Maggie Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read slowly, one poem at a time, with a dictionary and reference library nearby. He is dense, but the effort (sometimes) is worth it. Spiritual exploration returning always to a crumbling center.