Eric Pankey is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Augury and Crow-Work. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals and anthologies as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Poetry. A recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, Pankey has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merril Foundation. A 1983 graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, he is a professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and resides in Fairfax, Virginia.
Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels through such places as Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest. Along the way, Pankey ponders mortality, religious narratives and iconography, the continued press of childhood on the present, and the simultaneous violence and beauty of the natural world.
In these poems, revelation waits in all of nature’s smallest details: a lizard’s quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail’s shell. This is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence.
This collection takes as its subject the moment when emotion and energy flood a work of art. Inspired by the work of artists as chronologically and geographically diverse as Brueghel, Anish Kapoor, Caravaggio, and James Turrell, these poems seek not only to explain great art, but also to embody it.
Navigating both depression and the search for inspiration, this collection sits at the threshold between faith and doubt, the visible and the invisible, the physical and the metaphysical. These poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment when we—believers and nonbelievers alike—must ultimately pause to question the uncertain fate of our souls.
