In his eighteenth collection of poetry,Eric Pankey continues his forty-year investigation into how and what one can know in this world and beyond it. The poet, Jane Hirshfield, says about his poetry, "Eric Pankey is a poet of precise observation and startling particularities. His wisdom, sometimes sidelong, sometimes direct, both knows and feels. The soundcraft is superb, the modes of investigation by turns lyrical, surreal, meditative, allegorical, direct-speaking, and allusive."
Perception and the phenomenology of perception 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 this thing we call the real? What is the function of language, the medium of poetry, as we approach a gnosis beyond words—the mystical, say, or the sacred?
The poems move through a variety of landscapes—retreating glaciers, the west of Ireland and the Aran Islands, the high desert of the American Southwest, Provençal hill towns, and the scrappy suburban woods of the metro D.C. area where the poet lives. Written in the age of climate change, Pankey's poems are keenly aware of the world he inhabits and, in inhabiting, damages—a paradise, like all the others, lost, and if not lost, soon to be.
As in Pankey's previous work, the poems in Vanishments approach with care and precision, and with insight and speculation, questions of faith and doubt, the familiar and the arcane, and the quotidian and the spectral. The poet and translator, John Taylor, says of Pankey's poetry, "Marked by an intriguing dialectic of owning and debt, of fullness and absence, of receptiveness and inability, these intense, thoughtful poems trace an arduous spiritual 'pilgrimage' of the highest metaphysical order."
