Pankey, Eric
Description
Cenotaph is the third panel in a triptych of books that began with Apocrypha and continued with The Late Romances. All contain poems "stained with gri
...
ef," as Pamela Alexander described Pankey's work in the Boston Book Review -- grief for the passing of the poet's parents, of his teachers and friends, and of his own once-held belief.
Pankey's poetry vibrates with a deep and delicate musicality. The natural world that sustains and buries us here becomes refracted into an intricate web of glinting, harrowing light, into words circumscribing absence. Jeff Hamilton said in Delmar that Pankey's eschatological poems are written from the "vantage of the lapsed sublime."
In these extraordinary poems of spiritual crisis, gravity and grace, sacred and profane love, the mythic and the heirloom, are all confronted at the open threshold of an empty tomb -- the cenotaph -- where doubt, not faith, awaits.
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