"Or Thorns Compose So Rich a Crown"
from Eric Pankey's
Reliquaries

Eric Pankey:

Eric Pankey is the author of six previous books: For the New Year, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Heartwood, Apocypha, The Late Romances, Cenotaph, which won the Poetry Award from the Library of Virginia, and Oracle Figures (Ausable Press, 2003). His work has been supported by fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A Professor of English at George Mason University, he lives with his wife and daughter in Fairfax, Virginia.

About Reliquaries:

"Since the 1980s, I have had the pleasure of reading Eric Pankey's poetry. I have watched it shift from the precocious, plainspoken meditations of his first book, For the New Year, to the ornate — in both style and ideation — middle poems of spiritual crisis and, in this latest work, Reliquaries, to spiritual surrender. For me, there has been a held-breath expectancy at each new book: the feeling that one used to have when watching a high-wire act was a routine part of the cultural experience of childhood — watching an aerialist turn the simple activity of taking a walk into a spectacle. Like the work of the aerialist (the single figure poised above the crowd) Pankey's poetry seems to issue from the possibilities of heroic isolation. 'A beauty of limitations was lost / on the mob,' Pankey writes in Reliquaries. With each volume I have held my breath to see him not falter in his pursuit of the beautiful.

"Reliquaries, Pankey's seventh volume, links itself to his previous books with its memorial and spiritual preoccupations. Perhaps inevitably, the long trajectory of these interests has led critics to describe this work as a 'spiritual journey.' Instead of the journey, I much prefer Pankey's formulation of his own poetic project: that of the triptych. 'Journey' denotes a progress through time and the possibility of arrival. The journey, in other words, is in league with the temporal. The triptych is in league with the material: time is stopped in the presence of this object. There is no progression through the triptych. The viewer's glance is played among the panels, the viewer's experience written, rewritten, the images presented and re-presented.

"'And so it is, here, in this remarkable new book. These new poems are haunted by the old. There is, however, a grit to the beauties of Reliquaries. As Pankey's work has traded the tactics of transparent sincerity for manifest artifice, ironically, perhaps, his poems have increased in pathos. One feels in Reliquaries that one is in the presence of the confession, however gorgeously shaped. And gorgeous this book is as well as thoughtful. These are soliloquies of spiritual surrender addressed to the Thou, overheard by the reader. They are 'performances ravishing and spellbinding, flames let loose.'"
— Lynn Emanuel

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