The Pear As One Example

by Eric Pankey

"Fans of an earlier generation of American poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, and Robert Bly, will find much to enjoy in this large volume of poetry that showcases an acute poetic prowess, capturing a range of heartfelt emotions and experiences." —NewPages "Allows readers to observe the nuances of style and thematic continuities within this atuhor's complex body of work... The poems within The Pear as One Example invoke barren landscapes and unremarkeable objects, rendering them a gem-like concentration of subjective concepts, which shine with 'arctic, oblique light' throughout." —Smartish Pace
This book off ers a generous selection from Eric Pankey’s previous seven collections of poetry as well a book-length group of new poems. For Pankey, language is a means of divination, of augury, of reading the world—the refracted past, the ephemeral present, and the mutable future. While these meditative poems are deeply philosophical, their subject is the world of things. In these poems, he explores the world by way of the body—the body as a marker of time, the body as a vessel of grief, the body as an ecstatic radiant filament. Like an alchemist, Pankey takes the elemental and transmutes it into the mythic. At the center of many of these poems is a spiritual crisis. Pankey is like the man Flannery O’Connor describes in her essay, “Novelist and Believer,” who “can neither believe nor contain himself in disbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.” Each of these poems is a pilgrimage. If Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the strange, arranged marriage that gave rise to American poetry, Pankey is their off at once expansive and concise, clear and hermetic, and visionary and mystic. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1959, Eric Pankey directed the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis for many years. For the last decade, he has taught in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he is professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his wife and daughter.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2008

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 5 out of 5]

The Pear As One Example selects from seven Eric Pankey volumes, and collects an eighth, Deep River. Pankey is a poet's poet. He requires patience, and rewards it, because it is not uncommon, reading him, to wonder whether the poem under hand differs sufficiently from the one just read to risk an apprehension of the pleasure the poet's craft offers. In other words, there's a deep knowing in poem-ways to be had in reading Pankey, a pleasure in voicing, trope, word-sense moving in and out of phrase, line, sentence, stanza, poem and book.

The trajectory of work The Pear As One Example follows traces a line of broad characterization within the period style of personal lyric and pastoral cultural location we associate with the Seventies in poetry -- this is the work of the first two books, For the New Year and Heartwood. With Apocrypha (1991), however, Pankey discovers a middle-style astonishing in its phrase-making and tunesmithing within what Stevens would have called the "interior paramour". That mature style culminates three books later in Oracle Figures (2003), and leads to a fascinating stylistic break in Reliquaries (2005), which is a book-length sequence of five-line stanzas, two to a page, front/back, bedighted with titles every twenty lines. The formal break seems to me as radical as the 77 Dream Songs altering of the sonnet form.

Here is all one needs to get started on Pankey.

[Grace Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I go back to often and always find something new and wonderful. The language is superb and elegant. I heard Pankey read once and it was so energy-less that I didn't think I would like the poetry. Thank goodness I went to the book because it is now one of my favorites for just pure enjoyment. I have learned so much from Pankey about language, line, imagery, and beauty in poetry. For example (picked at random):

"Natural History

1.
Light settled in slowly like the silt in the choked-off creekbed
until morning. Time passed like that.

After a long hunt for fossils in the scarped and silvery
clay of the bank

my brother couldn't decide
if the chipped finger-length stones we found

were the remains of marsh grass, or the spines of extinct fish
that lived so deep they were their own source of light..."

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the new poems collected here were great, I hard a hard time picking through the selections. I look forward to reading the individual collections when I can track them down.