Vanishments

Inhis eighteenth collection of poetry, Eric Pankey continues hisforty-year investigation into how and what one can know in this world andbeyond it. The poet, Jane Hirshfield, says about his poetry, “Eric Pankey is apoet of precise observation and startling particularities. His wisdom,sometimes sidelong, sometimes direct, both knows and feels. The soundcraft issuperb, the modes of investigation by turns lyrical, surreal, meditative,allegorical, direct-speaking, and allusive.”

Perception and the phenomenology ofperception are central to the concerns of these beautifully austere poems.“Nothing is more difficult,” the first poem in the book quotes Merleau-Ponty,“than to know precisely what we see.” How is knowledge made manifest?How do our senses clarify our knowing? In what way do our senses distort thisthing we call the real? What is the function of language, the medium ofpoetry, as we approach a gnosis beyond words—the mystical, say, or the sacred?

The poems move through a variety oflandscapes—retreating glaciers, the west of Ireland and the Aran Islands, thehigh desert of the American Southwest, Provençal hill towns, and the scrappysuburban woods of the metro D.C. area where the poet lives. Written in the ageof climate change, Pankey’s poems are keenly aware of the world he inhabitsand, in inhabiting, damages—a paradise, like all the others, lost, and if notlost, soon to be.

As in Pankey’s previous work, thepoems in Vanishments approach with care and precision, and with insightand speculation, questions of faith and doubt, the familiar and the arcane, andthe quotidian and the spectral. The poet and translator, John Taylor, says ofPankey’s poetry, “Marked by an intriguing dialectic of owning and debt, offullness and absence, of receptiveness and inability, these intense, thoughtfulpoems trace an arduous spiritual ‘pilgrimage’ of the highest metaphysicalorder.”