Overview

A book-length collection of new prose poems together with selections from the poet's previous works. Lunar Calendar draws together prose poems from Eric Pankey's many collections together with a book-length collection of new poems. While written in prose form, these poems maintain the lively lyric intensity of Pankey's verse poems, allowing for mystery and uncanniness, for wandering and wondering, for speculation and revery. David Keplinger writes, ""Eric Pankey's … prose poetry [is] deeply faithful to the European roots of the genre … This work is spectacular."" Rachel Eliza Griffiths says of Pankey's poems, ""Like water, fire, air, memory and earth, these prose poems gather elementally into a revelatory force."" Ilya Kaminsky writes, ""This is a book of visions wherein mystery attempts to be clear. How? Clarity, clarity is our deepest mystery Mahmoud Darwish once told us."" Andew Zawacki notes that Pankey's is ""a beguiling book of inventories and elegies, of fugue and fever dream, of uncanny conundrums and para-fairy tales, in which doors open onto doors…""

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9781949933345

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Reviews

Praise for Eric Pankey ""Eric Pankey's sensibility is an unerringly generous one: he is always willing to step first onto unsteady ground, to test it for those who might follow. The poems … are skilled, deft, and dazzlingly alert. Just when I think they have brought me as close as possible to the dark and unknowable things that make awe possible, they bring me closer. The journey is unnerving, intimate, and thrilling."" — Mary Szybist ""It feels like there's more room in this book [of prose poems]—and by that I mean tonal range, but also more room for play, for whimsy, for delight, for memory, and for strangeness. There are still vestiges and themes of what we might call classic Pankey—the desire to identify patterns in the ordinary, to discover the divine, the need to consult the oracle bones, to throw the I-Ching hexagrams—and is there a poet alive, perhaps aside from Charles Wright, with a keener nose for the metaphysical?"" — Mark Wagenaar ""Like water, fire, air, memory and earth, these … poems gather elementally into a revelatory force."" –– Rachel Eliza Griffiths ""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."" — Jane Hirshfield ""The poems are prayers sent into the unknown, for one must penetrate the invisible to reside in the visible. One of their great pleasures is the door through which Pankey enters the mysteries: the natural world, with which he has profound intimacy. In language that is always elegant, complex, and rigorously truthful, he transfixes us with glimpses of what we can never fully know."" — Chase Twichell ""The poems … come together to create a landscape both melancholy and utterly beautiful … Tracing the spiritual as he senses it move through the natural world, he reminds us again and again that to occupy a space is to shape it, and the shaping of experience becomes finally the shaping of the page in language brilliantly wrought."" — Claudia Emerson ""Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it—where we can learn from what resists understanding, where even withholding reveals, where the future includes all the past, and though the mind might be obliterated by the light it seeks, it seeks it still."" — Dan Beachy-Quick ""Pankey remains one of our leading practitioners of the metaphysical poem."" — C. Dale Young ""In these precise, dream-like poems, Eric Pankey peers through the clarifying lens of metaphor and parable to meditate on mystery, human sympathy, and the divine … These are such deeply moving, humane, and thoughtful poems."" — Kevin Prufer ""The clarity, intellectual heft, structure, poise, formal dexterity, and music … Pankey has become a poet of formidable skill and achievement."" — Brian Henry ""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."" — John Taylor ""The voice here is consistent, startling, and carries enough authority to keep us turning pages. Pankey is nimble, even virtuoso, with the meditative mode, and his voice is well-established."" — Matthew Ampleman ""This is an intricate work of decisive oscillation, of tender and careful attention shifting swiftly and precisely between the infinitesimal and the vast, and between one concrete reality and another, without ever losing its way. Such sure-footed writing is astonishing. It would be an understatement to point out that the reader rarely encounters such piercing visionary states, with the author highly alert to sound and syllable, while focused on meaning. Throughout, the author probes our capacity for perception: What do we see (the present), remember (the past), and imagine (the future)? And how do we understand them? What elevates the writing even more is the unmistakable passion and urgency pulsing throughout each of the poem's sections, the deliberate and inspired choice of every word."" — John Yau

Author Information

Eric Pankey, whose honors include the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the New Measure Poetry Prize, is the author of many collections of poetry and a book of essays. His writing has been supported by fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Professor Emeritus of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University.

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